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SOME 



HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 



AMERICAN TRAVEL. 



BV 



EDWARD STRAHAN, SIDNEY LANIER, EDWARD A POLLARD 



J 



AND OTHERS. 



PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED. 




?s.^ "!*""««*, i. 



i1 









PHILADELPHIA 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 

1878. 






CUPYKICHT, 1877, 

By J. B. LippiNcoTT &■ Co 



Lippincott's Press. 

I'hil.uia. 



/ 



CONTENTS. 



PAGB 

A SWITCHBACK EXCURSION. H. C. Sheafer 5 

VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. Edward Strahan 22 

FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BALTIMORE. R. M. Copeland 55 

FROM THE POTOMAC TO THE OHIO. Edward Strahan 67 

"MAY" IN JUNE. Edward Strahan 83 

A NEW ATLANTIS. Edward Strahan 95 

ST. AUGUSTINE IN APRIL. Sidney Lanier 107 

THE OCKLAWAHA IN MAY. Sidney Lamer 121 

THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. E. A. Poi.i.akd 132 

3 



SOME 



HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 



OF 



AMERICAN TRAVEL. 



A SWITCHBACK EXCURSION. 




"THE KLA(;iTAKI-," MALCll CHUNK. 



T was on 
a pleas- 
ant morn- 
ing in early 
spring that 
I met the Artist and the Railroad-man 
at the depot of the North Pennsylvania 
Railroad, prepared to take the cars for 
what the Artist, who is addicted to pun- 
ning, called "the Switcherland of Amer- 
Our object was partly business 
and partly pleasure ; in the proportion 
uf nine parts of the latter to one of the 

5 



A SWITCHBACK EXCURSION. 



T- 




LUllCH C.A1. 



former: indeed, to be quite honest about 
it, we were all glad to have an excuse 
for a ten days' excursion in a region 
which promised so much outdoor enter- 
tainment. And the promise was kept. 
Such another ten days of rough-and- 
tumble experience — climbing mountains, 
falling over rocks, exploring wild ra- 
vines, diving into coal-mines, riding on 
every description of conveyance which 
it has entered into the mind of man to 
invent to run on rail — such enormous 
eating when we found an inn, and such 
extravagant sleeping when the day was 
done, — 1 doubt if any of the party had 
ever experienced before. 

The direct route from Philadelphia to 
the Lehigh Valley and the vSwitchback 
Railroad is up the North Pennsylvania 
Road, usually called the "North Penn," 
for short. This road cames you north- 



ward on a smooth. wcU-ballasted track, 
through a pleasant faiming-country, but 
shows you few points where you will 
care to spend much time in sight-seeing. 
If you are wise, you will elect, as we 
did, to be a through passenger. It ter- 
minates at Bethlehem, and is there met 
by two roads which run side by side up 
the narrow valley of the Lehigh, and 
open to the traveler one of the most de- 
lightful short -trip routes in America. 
Fifty years ago the valley was a wilder- 
ness, with one narrow wagon-road crawl- 
ing at the base of the hills beside a moun- 
tain-torrent which defied all attempts to 
navigate it. Now, the mountain-walls 
make room for two railroads and a ca- 
nal, but the tawny waters of the stream 
are nearly as free as ever. Here and 
there, indeed, a curb restrains them, 
and once an elaborate system of dams 



A SWITCHBACK EXCURSION. 




and locks tamed the wild river, and 
made it from Mauch Chunk to White 
Haven a succession of deep and tranquil 
pools. But one day in 1862 the waters 
rose in their might. Every dam was 
broken, every restraint swept away, and 
from White Haven to Mauch Chunk the 
stream ran free once more. The mem- 



MAut^hi Chunk kkum thk mountain-ROAD. 

ory of that fearful day is still fresh in the 
minds of the dwellers in the valley, and 
the bed of the torrent is still strewn with 
the wrecks that went down before its 
wrath. The Lehigh Company, who had 
planned and constructed this magnif- 
icent system of slackwater navigation, 
looked on in silent dismay, saw the 
labor of years vanish in a moment, 
shook their heads, and — proceeded to 
build a railroad. After that day's ex- 
perience they felt as if they could never 
trust the river again. 



A SWITCHBACK EXCURSION. 



I have said that our trip was partly for 
business and partly for pleasure. Had 
it been wholly for pleasure, we should 
have waited for the 9.45 train from the 
North Penn depot, which would have 
taken us over the Lehigh and Susque- 



hanna Road. As it was, we rose at an 
uncomfortably early hour and took the 
eight o'clock train, which connects with 
the Lehigh Valley Road. In either case, 
however, the discomfort ends with the 
traveler's arrival at the depot. Thence 




RESIDENCES OF HON. ASA PACKER AND HON. JOHN LEISENRING, MAUCH CHUNK. 



comfortable cars take him to Bethlehem, 
and from Bethlehem northward, over 
either road, through the picturesque Le- 
high Gap and up the mountain-valley. 

Soon after leaving Bethlehem the 
mountains approach the bed of the 
stream, and at the Gap fling themselves 
directly in its path, leaving it no resource 
but to go through them ; which it has 
accordingly done, cleaving the moun- 
tain from summit to base in its efforts to 
escape. 

But it is not until the vicinity of Mauch 
Chunk is reached that the peculiar fea- 
tures of the Lehigh Valley appear in 
perfection. From here northward it is 
little better than a canon enclosed be- 
tween high mountain -walls, at whose 
bases the narrow stream tumbles and 
foams, its waters now displaying the rich 
amber hue which they have distilled 



from the roots and plants in the swamps 
around their source, now white from 
their encounter with rock or fall. Huge 
rocks hang directly overhead, and threat- 
en to fall at any moment upon the trains 
which constantly roll beneath ; branches 
wave and flowers bloom on the hillside, 
so close to the track of the railroad that 
the passenger can almost reach them 
without leaving his seat ; here and there 
a miniature waterfall tumbles over the 
brow of a mountain, and glances, a rib- 
bon of foam and spray, to the river at 
its foot ; and at frequent intervals ra- 
vines cut in the mountain-side present a 
confusion of rocks and wood and water 
to the eye of the traveler as he flashes 
by. Traced back a little way from their 
mouths, these glens often show a wealth 
of beauty, a succession of snowy cas- 
cades, transparent _pools and romantic 



A SIVITCHBACK EXCURSION. 



nooks which are an ever fresh surprise 
to the explorer. 

At White Haven both roads leave the 
valley, cross the intervening mountain 
and descend into the Wyoming V^alley 
— a land celebrated in song and storj', 
a land famous alike for its beauty and 
its history. This, by the way, to fill up 
the gap, as it were, between our depart- 
ure from Philadelphia and our arrival at 
Mauch Chunk. Here we were 
to change cars and run up the 
Nesquehoning Road to the 
High Bridge. Half the pro- 
posed change was accom- 
plished successfully. We left 
the Lehigh Valley train, but 
while we waited for the Nes- 
quehoning train to draw up in 
front of the Mansion House, 
it came and went, and we 
missed it. 

" No matter," said the Rail- 
road-man. "We'll catch it at 
the depot." Now the depot 
was a quarter of a mile away, 
and the train stopped there 
about a quarter of a minute. 
Evidently, there was no time 
to be lost. We struck into a 
lively run, the best man ahead, 
while the Mauch Chunkites 
looked out from four tiers of 
houses to see the procession. 
We made good time in that 
quarter -mile heat, but the 
track was curved and the 
train had the inside. So we missed it. 
It was the second time I had chased a 
railroad-train, and I missed the first one. 
I begin to believe I can't catch one. 

When we arrived at the depot the 
Artist and I said we had had enough 
railroading for one day. We were sur- 
prised to find what an appetite our ex- 
ercise had developed, and proposed to 
adjourn for dinner ; but the Railroad- 
man wouldn't listen to us. He was 
bound for the Nesquehoning, train or no 
train, and he went. In less than five 
minutes he had impressed a freight- 
train, loaded us on it, and we were off. 
The conductor warned us to " Look out 
for sparks. She throws cinders pretty 



lively, sometimes ;" and we soon began 
to perceive the value of his admonition. 
"She " — meaning the locomotive — utter- 
ed a preliminary whistle, and then be- 
gan to snort like a porpoise with the 
whooping-cough, while the atmosphere 




suddenly put on an ap 
pearance as if a burnt- 
cork factory was being distributed 
through it in fine particles. The first 
rod we traveled we turned our backs on 
the engine ; the second we turned up 
our coat-collars ; the third we crawled 
behind a pile of sills on an open truck 
— the same upon which we had at first 
been seated. But all would not do. 
The cinders continued to find us. They 
flew into our mouths and ears and eyes 
and noses, and down our backs and 
up under our hats ; and wherever they 
went they burned ; and when we pres- 
ently struck a heavy grade they came 
faster than ever. Human nature could 



A SWITCHBACK EXCURSIOX. 



not stand it. "See here," said we, "this 
won't do. We shall all look like con- 
valescent smallpox patients in tive min- 
utes more. Let's get out of this." 

" Easier said than done. There isn't a 
covered car on the train, and we're run- 
ning too fast to jump off. Besides, we're 
bound to see the bridge if we die for it." 




NESQUEHONING BRIDGE. 

" Let's get out on the cow-catcher." 

" Lucky thought ! But have you ever 
tried it?" 

"Often. No cinders there, no smoke, 
no dust ; but a pleasant breeze that will 
be delightful this warm day ; and then 
you're always the first to arrive." 

"Enough! Lead on !" 

We went forward and interviewed the 
engineer. That dignitary was disposed 
to accommodate us, but recommended 
"a bright lookout for cows." 



''''Cows ! up here in the woods I" 
" Lots of 'em. Run over one every 
once in a while." 

"All right ! If we see a cow we'll let 
you know." We wanted to show that 
engineer that we were brave men. We 
never had been afraid of cows, and were 
not going to be now. Besides, we were 
half inclined to believe 
he was hoaxing us. It 
didn't look like a good 
cow-country; and even 
if it was, and the cows 
were thick as grasshop- 
pers, it was his business 
to steer clear of them. 
That's what he was 
there for. 

So we stepped lightly 
out on the footboard, 
took a hard grip on the 
handrail and cautiously 
made our way along the 
iron monster's side, 
placed a foot on the 
steam-chest, swung over 
on the bumper, and 
there we were. It was 
a glorious ride. The 
broad platform on the 
front of the engine fur- 
nished excellent seats, 
albeit they were a trifle 
hard, and the bars of 
the "pilot," as railroad- 
men term the article 
known to us as the cow- 
catcher, seemed made 
on purpose for foot- 
rests. We could feel 
every throb of the en- 
gine's fiery heart, every 
gasp of its rapid breathing: every joint 
of the rails sounded as we passed like 
the tramp of an iron hoof, and the huge 
machine trembled in every fibre as it 
flew along Tike a hving creature urged 
to its utmost speed. The air was balmy, 
the discomforts of the train all behind 
us, and before us just enough prospect 
of danger to add a pleasant thrill of ex- 
citement to the attractions of the ride. 
The sharp nose of the "pilot" skimmed 
along just above the track, threatening 



A SWITCHBACK EXCURSIOX. 



every instant to bury itself in the next 
stone or sill that showed its head above 
the dead level, and tumble us all into 
the ditch, but always clearing the ob- 
stacle by an inch or two, and running 
on without a jar. For pleasant railroad- 
traveling in warm weather I must rec- 
ommend the cow - catcher. There's 
nothing like it. The only drawback is 
that it is risky. The 
cars may run off the 
track and smash all to 
bits, and you may 
crawl out from under 
the ruins perfectly un- 
injured. I even know 
an engineer whose en- 
gine took hini'down an 
embankment, and lit- 
erally, and without any 
fiction about it, rolled 
over him twice ; and 
he picked himself up 
as sound as you are, 
got another engine 
and train and went 
ahead, for it was war- 
time and he was con- 
veying important or- 
ders. But a cow-catch- 
er never does things 
by halves. You ride 
safely or you are kill- 
ed instantly : one or 
the other is bound to 
happen. 

In our case it was 
tiie former. We rush- 
ed along in perfect 
safety, and though the 
predicted cow appeared in due time, 
and stood defiantly on the track for a 
while, she changed her mind before we 
came within striking-distance and walk- 
ed quietly away. 

The Nesquehoning bridge has great 
local celebrity as the highest bridge in 
the country. It is flung from one moun- 
tain to another at an elevation of one 
hundred and sixty-eight feet above the 
Little Schuylkill, an insignificant stream 
flowing through a deep gorge. Its length 
is eleven hundred feet, and the view 
each way from its platform is one worth 



going all the way to see. The Railroad- 
man inspected it. The Artist made what 
he called a " rough sketch" of it — it took 
him ten minutes, and looked like a per- 
spective view of a centipede — and then 
the Catawissa Express came along, and 
carried us back to Mauch Chunk and a 
late dinner. 

It was the first day out, and we didn't 




i\H)LM llM.All PIANt 

care how hard we traveled. We learned 
better afterward, but now, when the Rail- 
road-man said, "Shall we go over the 
Switchback this afternoon ?" the ques- 
tion was carried unanimously in the 
affirmative. 

So he sent out and ordered a "special 
train." That sounds magnificent, does 
it not ? We thought so, and we felt like 
millionaires as we walked into the Man- 
sion House and ordered our late dinner. 

Dinner over, we walked leisurely to 
"the train " — a stroll which involved the 
ascent of what, in any other part of the 



A SWITCHBACK EXCURSION. 



country, would be called "pretty consid- 
erable of a hill." The Gravity Road 
nominally runs to the foot of Mount 
Fisgah, but the road gives out some time 
before the gravity does. Ordinary tour- 
ists make the intervening distance in 
coaches — we aristocrats did it on foot. 







"•^ 




VIEW hOLllI IKu.M llIK 1 REi>l LlNi;, -MtJLNT PlSGAll 



The special train was in waiting when 
we arrived. It consisted of one flat car, 
half the size of a billiard-table, with 
seats for ten, and no top. A pretty little 
affair, what there was of it, but it scarcely 
came up to our expectations of a special 
train. 

"This is the superintendent's car. 
He has loaned it to us as a special favor. 
The covered cars will not suit our pur- 
pose as well as this." 



Then we took heart again, and got on 
board, but the Artist looked suspicious- 
ly at the track before us, and asked 
questions enough to fill the Shorter 
Catechism. 

"What's that ?" 

" Mount Fisgah Plane, two thousand 
three hundred and 
twenty -two feet 
long. You are 
now two hundred 
and fifteen feet 
above the river, 
and the river here 
is five hundred 
and twenty feet 
above tide-water ; 
and when you get 
to the top of the 
plane you will be 
six hundred and 
sixty - four feet 
higher still. That 
iron band hauls 
up the empty cars 
on their way back 
to the mines. It 
is attached to a 
' safety-truck ,' 
which is down in 
that hole at the 
foot of the plane. 
It goes down 
there, so that the 
cars can pass over 
and get in front 
of it. There it 
goes now. You 
see it pushes ten 
or a dozen cars 
before it up the 
plane. The wire 
rope which it 
drags after it runs over a drum-wheel at 
the foot of the plane — there it is, that 
uneasy thing which is always trying to 
haul a cart-load of old iron up the hill, 
and never succeeding^and the other 
end of the rope pulls down the safety- 
truck on the other track. You see that 
long arm which projects from the side 
of the safety-truck and counts the teeth 
of that iron thingumbob between the 
tracks with such monotonous regularity ? 



A SWITCHBACK EXCURSION. 



That's the ' safety' part of the arrange- 
ment. It is expected to hold the train 
right there in case the bands happen to 
break. — Oh, bless you, yes ! They break 
every now and then. Never broke yet 
Avith a passenger-train, though — we don't 
load 'em heavy enough — but if they did 
the ratchet would 
hold the cars till 
the bands were 
spliced again. 
This is the last 
season for coal- 
trains. We are 
sending a good 
deal of our coal 
through the Nes- 
quehoning tunnel 
now, and pretty 
soon shall send it 
all that way ; and 
then this road will 
be used for pas- 
senger business 
exclusively." 

This connected 
discourse is the 
substance of an- 
swers to the Art- 
ist's catechism. 
The questions 
would only take 
up room to no pur- 
pose, and, besides, 
I like to dispense 
information in sol- 
id chunks. 

By the time this 
exercise was con- 
cluded we were on 
our way up the 
plane. Our ten or 
twelve hundred 
pounds were a mere bagatelle to the big 
engines accustomed to drawing up fif- 
teen or twenty tons at a time, and we 
glided lightly and safely to the top, 
where the catechetical instruction was 
resumed. 

" Angle of plane is about twenty de- 
grees. That is Upper Mauch Chunk on 
the plateau to the right of the plane, 
and across the river you see East Mauch 
Chunk. Better location than the orig- 



inal settlement — after you get up to it. 
No trouble about the drainage, eh ? 
Old town was started in 1818. Urst 
child — living still, I believe — was Nich- 
olas Brink, born in 1820, and was 
named after everybody in the settle- 
ment. Had names enough for all his 




VIEW NORTH FROM THE TRESTLING, MOUNT PISGAH. 



descendants to the third generation. 
It's getting late. All aboard !"— and he 
hurried us away without giving us half 
enough time to enjoy the magnificent 
views from the trestling at the top of the 
plane. We must keep moving if we 
would do the whole twenty-five miles of 
C.ravity Road between that time and six 
o'clock, when the planes would cease 
working. So we set out without further 
delav. 



H 



A SWITCHBACK EXCURSION. 




UN THE GRADE. 




MANSION HOUSE, MAUCH CHUNK. 



The Railroad -man 
sat in front and held 
the brake, a lever by 
which he could slow or 
stop the truck at will ; 
but he seldom had the 
will to do it. As a 
j^eneral thing, he let it 
lun. The grade from 
Mount Pisgah to the 
foot of Mount Jeffer- 
son is sixty feet to the 
mile — just enough to 
propel a light car at a 
moderate speed. The 
ride was through the 
woods all the way — a 
pleasant, breezy, cool 
and clean run, with no 
danger in it that could 
not be avoided by a 
judicious use of the 
brake. At Mount Jef- 
ferson we wer, hauled 
up another plane, two 
thousand and seventy 
feet long, and four 
hundred and sixty-two 
feet high ; and one 



A SIVITCHBACK EXCURSION. 



mile from its top we ran into Summit 
Hill. 

Then we ran down into Panther 
Creek Valley, and traversed the whole 
course of the Switchback Road, re- 
turning late in the evening, and whizz- 
ing down the nine miles between Sum- 
mit Hill and Mauch Chunk in nine- 
teen minutes. 

Mine host Booth, at the Mansion 
House, gave us, as he gives everybody, 
an excellent supper and splendid beds, 
and we made his house our head-quar- 
ters during our stay. We sat on the 
piazza after supper and smoked cigars 
and chatted, and watched the fires on 
the mountains, which drew bands of 
flame all around the town, and counted 
the long coal-trains that wound among 
the hills on either side of the valley ; 
and when we were tired of this we went 
to bed, and were lulled to sleep by the 
plash and drowsy tumult of the river 
under our windows. 

We made another trip over the Switch- 
back a few days after, and as this is not 
a consecutive narrative I may as well tell 
the whole story here, and have done 
with it. 

To begin at the beginning: "The 
Switchback" is not a switchback at all, 
in the technical sense of the word, and 
has not been for years. Originally, 
there were several switchbacks along 
the "Gravity Railroad," which is the 
proper name. for the line under consid- 
eration, and they were operated thus: 
the cars, running smoothly on a down 
grade, would reach a point where thev 
suddenly found themselves going up 
hill at such a rate that they were quick- 
ly compelled to stop. Then the attrac- 
tion of gravitation, constantly drawing 
them down hill, would cause them to 
reverse their direction and run back ; 
but when they again reached the place 
where the grade changed, a switch, 
worked by a spring, threw them on an- 
other track, and they continued their 
journey down the mountain in a direc- 
tK)n contrary to that in which they had 
Ren running before they came to the 
switchback. The next interruption 
would send them in the original direc- 




VIEVV IN THE "OPEN OUAKRV. 



tion ; and in this zigzag fashion they 
accomplished the descent into Panther 
Creek Valley. Later and better en- 
gineering has changed the switchbacks 
into curves, and the descent from Sum- 
mit Hill to the mines is made without 
interruption ; but the name, which at 
first was local and applied to a particu- 
lar point, gradually spread until it in- 
cluded the entire road. 

And now, having done away with the 
switchback business, we will adhere to 
the proper title, and call our mountain- 
path the Gravity Road. ' 




COAL VEIN. 



i6 



A SWITCHBACK EXCURSION. 




This is next to the oldest railroad in 
the United States. Its only predecessor 
was a road three miles long connected 
with the Quincy stone-quarries in Massa- 
chusetts. That was built in the fall of 
1826 — this went into operation in May, 
1827. 

At first the road extended only from 
Summit Hill to Mauch Chunk. There 
was no return track, and consequently 
no planes, the empty cars being hauled 
back to the mines by gangs of mules, 
which, in turn, were transported to 
Mauch Chunk in cars designed express- 
ly for their use — a ride which they learn- 
ed to value so much that no amount of 
persuasion could induce them to make 
the journey on foot. Subsequently, the 
Panther Creek mines were opened, the 



Switchback propei made to reach them, 
and planes built to assist gravitation in 
tiansporting the cars 

We visited the spot wheie, in 1791, 
Philip Ginther stumbled over a fortune 
that was not for him, and where the 
famous "Open Quarry " was afterward 
worked. A part of the wide excavation 
has been filled up with the refuse from 
other workings, but enough remains to 
give the visitor an idea of the immense 
mass of coal originally deposited here. A 
better idea of the disposition of the strata 
can be gained, however, at an adjoining 
opening, where the outcrop of the vein 
has fallen into the subterranean work- 
ings. The solid mass of coal is here 
seen just as the last earthquake left it — 
a mass of pure, glittering fuel, forty feet 
or more in thickness (we did not mea- 
sure it, for reasons apparent in the illus- 
tration), and running, at a steep pitch, 
far down into the bowels of the earth. ^ 
"This fall," said the Railroad-man, 
"carried part of the track running into 
' No. 2' down with it, and we had no end 



A SlVnCHBACK EXCURSION. 



17 



of bother with it before we got it filled 
up again and the track relaid. That 
hole you see at the bottom is some six 
hundred feet deep, and dumping gravel 
into it was almost like trying to fill up 
the bottomless pit itself." 

"Why didn't you go round it ?" 

"Couldn't. You see those alps of 
coal-dirt all around us. We should have 
had to move those at any rate, and so 
we just moved a few of them in here 
— sent them back where they came 
from, as it were — and so at last the 
thing was done." 

" Does that thing happen often .?" 

"What thing.?" 

" Losing your track suddenly in that 
fashion. Because, if it is, we prefer 
some other road. We're not ready to 
start for China by the underground 
route just yet." 

" Don't alarm yourselves. We keep 
a lookout for breakdowns, and know 
just where the ground is weak. You 
will go through safely enough this 
trip, and hereafter, if you're fearful, 
you can confine yourselves to the regu- 
lar passenger-route from Mauch Chunk 
to Summit Hill and return. There's 
no danger there." 

So we were comforted, and went on 
to "No. 2," which is one of the oldest 
collieries in the region ; and enjoyed 
the fine view of Panther Creek Valley 
which is seen from the end of its dirt- 
bank; and looked down the slope, which 
they told us was fifteen hundred feet 
deep (we didn't measure it) ; and then 
we took a look at Summit Hill, which is 
dirty and uninteresting in itself, like all 
mining towns ; and then we mounted 
our truck again and shot down a fear- 
fully steep grade into Panther Creek 
Valley. 

Here one of the first things we were 
shown was a burning mine, but it was a 
poor affair, recently kindled and on the 
verge of being extinguished. The only 
noticeable thing about it was the process 
of putting out the fire by forcing car- 
bonic acid gas into the mine, and that 
we dsd not see. There is another mine 
at Summit Hill, which has been burning 
for thirty years, and is likely to burn for 
2 



thirty more : that, now, is something to 
brag of. A greater curiosity was the 
entrance to the Nesquehoning tunnel, 
four thousand feet long, a work com- 
pleted last winter, and one which at one 
fell swoop claps an extinguisher on the 
Gravity Road with all its complicated 
machinery. Hereafter, all the coal of 
this region, instead of careering wildly 




JIM. 

over the mountains, drawn by viewless 
steeds and enveloped in an atmosphere 
of romance, will be drawn by a com- 
monplace locomotive upon a common- 
place track through this tunnel and 
down the Nesquehoning Road, to Mauch 
Chunk and a market. But the Gravity 
Road will remain for the present, and 
passenger-trains will still run on it for 
the accommodation of those who wish 
to enjoy its exhilarating ride, its grand 
scenery and its many points of interest. 

Before our return home, the Railroad- 
man proposed that we should spend a 
day at Upper Lehigh. 

"Where's that ? ' shouted the chorus. 

"Up among the mountains back of 
White Haven. New place, just chopped 
out of the woods : splendid scenery- 
rocks, ravines, cascades, good hotel — " 



i8 



A SVVirCHBACK EXCURSION.. 







PROSPECT ROCK AiNU THE NESCOPEC VALLEY 



" That'll do ! When do we start ?" 
The Railroad-man named a time for 
rising, somewhere among "the wee, sma' 
hours;" and with the time came Jim to 
wake us. 

Jim is one of the institutions of Mauch 
Chunk. He is a colored citizen, the 
porter of the Mansion House, and his 
duties are those heterogeneous ones 
which pertain to porters generally, and 
to porters in country hotels particularly. 
To the traveler entering the town by the 
Lehigh and Susquehanna Road the first 
sight of Mauch Chunk is Jim standing 



m fionl of the hotel 
and shouting, "Twenty 
minutes for dinner ! Step 
right this way, gemmen." 
And when the twenty min- 
utes have expired, Jim is seen 
vibrating like an ebony shut- 
tlecock between the train and 
the hotel, gesticulating ex- 
citedly and urging the trav- 
elers to an immediate de- 
parture. " Time's up, gem- 
men ! Train's a-goin'. All 
aboard !" Then to the conductor, " Hi ! 
hold on, dar ! Heah's a couple o' ladies 
yit." ■ This duty fulfilled, Jim retires into 
his sanctum, where he may be seen at 
any time between-trains, blacking boots 
and lecturing on politics to chance 
hearers. 

Well, Jim called us in the early morn- 
ing — and morning among the Lehigh 
Mountains is worth getting up to see. 
We ate our breakfast, went to White 
Haven, changed cars, and rode up the 
Nescopec Railroad to L'pper Lehigh. 
The Nescopec Road is nine miles long, 



A SIVITCHBACK EXCURSION. 



19 



and runs nothing but through trains, by 
reason of there being no way stations on 
the route. At the end of it is a coal- 
breaker, one of the best in the anthra- 
cite region, shipping five thousand tons 
of coal a week ; 
a good hotel 
the Railroad- 
man was right 
about that ; a 
row of miners' 
houses and — 
woods. We 
walked about 
half a mile 
along a wood- 
road, struck 
into a footpath, 
followed it a 
hundred yards 
or so, and with- 
out warning, 
walked out on 
a flat rock from 
which we could 
a t first see 
nothing but 
fog, up, down or 
around. It was 
a misty morn- 
ing, but we 
made out to 
understand 
that we were 
on the verge of 
a precipice 
which fell sheer 
down into a 
tremendous 
abyss; and 
when the fog 
lifted, as it did 
about noon, we 
looked out 
upon miles 
and miles of valleys partly cleared, but 
principally covered with the primeval 
forest. 

We were on Prospect Rock then. 
Presently our guide took us, by a round- 
about way, to Cloud Point, a corre- 
sponding projection, on the other side 
of the glen, and here a still wider view, 
another yet the same, lay before us. 



We gazed on the beautiful landscape 
until we thought we could afford to leave 
it for a while, and then descended into 
Glen Thomas, so called in honor of 
David Thomas, the pioneer of the iron 




CLOUD POINT, UPPER LEHIGH. 



trade on the Lehigh. It 
was the first of May, but we 
found here mmiature gla- 
ciers formed by the water 
falling over the rocks, the 
ice three feet and more in 
thickness, and so solid that 
a pistol-ball fired at it point- 
blank rebounded as from a 
rock, while not a hundred 
yards away May flowers 
were blooming in fragrant 
abundance. 
We spent the whole day in rambling 
over the rocks and through the glen, 
and at evening took the return train to 
White Haven, the Artist and the Pho- 
tographer — who had joined us at Mauch 
Chunk — vowing to return soon and 
often. 

Another long-to-be-remeixibered ex- 
cursion was to Moore's Ravine, a wrinkle 



A SWITCHBACK EXCURSION. 



in the mountain-side two miles 
above Mauch Chunk, fill- 
ed with tall hemlockb, and 
at their feet a stream turn 
bling, in a continual sue ^ 
cession of cascades, fioni 
the top of a moun- 
tain to its base. In 
little more than a 
quarter of a mile the 
stream makes a sheei 
descent of at least 
three hundred feet, 
distributing it m 
twenty -one cascades 
and waterfalls. Two 
of these, which aiL 
so close together 
as almost to make ^ , 
one continuous 
fall and are 
named Moore's 
F a 1 Is, are 
over a hun 
dred feet 
in t o t a 
height. 
The oth- 
ers are 
smaller, 
but 
no 




MOORRS FALLS. 



less beautiful, while the limpid pools 
of still water among them are by no 
means the least attractions of the place. 



But the 
glen IS as 
wild as it 
is picturesque, 
and to see it 
requires a good 
supply of both 
muscle and perse- 
verance. It has nev- 
"- cr been "improved," 
even to the extent of a 
footpath, and the visitor might 
fancy himself the first that had 
ever entered it if it were not 
for the evidences to the con- 
trary borne by prominent 
places where a couple of idiots 
have scrawled their names in white pai nt. 
I hope I may be forgiven for wishing 
they had tumbled over the highest fall. 



A SWITCHBACK EXCURSION. 



But the growing length of this article 
warns me to "cut it short." I may not 
tell of our carriage-ride into the Ma- 
honing Valley, with its pleasant 
views and drives ; nor of moun- 
tain-climbing at Mauch Chunk ; 
nor of the flying visit we paid 
to Wilkesbarre and Scranton in 
the beautiful Wyoming Valley ; 
nor of the day we spent in the 
pleasant Moravian town of Beth- 
lehem, where we put up at an an- 
cient hostelrie which was called 
the " Sun Tavern" a hundred and 
odd years ago, and which, under 
the more modern title of the " Sun 
Hotel," is now, as it was then, 
one of the best inns in the inte- 
rior of the State. All 
these things must re- 
main untold, but the 
reader can enjoy them 
all for himself at small 
cost of time or money. 
He can see the Lehigh 
Valley, Switchback 
and all, in a single 
day, returning to Phil- 
adelphia the same 
evening, or he can 
spend a whole sum- 
mer in exploring its 
woods and mountains. 

His best plan, how- 
ever, for a short trip, 
is to leave Philadelphia 
or New York on one of 
the early trains, timing 
himself so that he can 
be at the Mansion 
House, Mauch Chunk, 
in time for dinner. 
This is the best hotel 
in the valley above 
AUentown, and for that 
reason he will do well 
to make it his stopping- 




place for the night. After dinner he 
will have plenty of time to go over the 
Gravity Road and return in time for 
supper. Next morn- 
ing an early train will 
take him to White 
Haven, where he can 
change cars and run 
up the Nescopec Road 
to Upper Lehigh, 
which he will reach 
about noon. Here he 
will have ample time 
to dine and explore 
Glen Thomas, but 
not to see all the fine 
views from this sin- 
gjLilar mountain - top 
if he would return by 
the afternoon train. 
This train makes con- 
nections for both Phil- 
adelphia and New 
York, either of which 
can be reached the 
same evening ; but 
a third day can be 
profitably spent at 
Upper Lehigh, and 
part of a fourth in ex- 
ploring Moore's Ra- 
vine — to me one of 
the greatest attractions 
about Mauch Chunk, 
but, unfortunately, ac- 
cessible from that 
place only on foot. 
It demands a hard 
walk and a hard 
climb, but offers in re- 
turn a scene of wild 
and rugged magnif- 
icence which in all 
my mountain - climb- 
ing I have never seen 
excelled. 



•AMBER CASCADE, GLEN THOMAS. 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



WE can think of but one British poet of eminence 
who has described an American river from real 
personal examination and intimacy, and that with such 
memorable iteration that its praises are really bound 
up with the great circulating volume of English song. 
The residence of Arthur Hugh Clough in this country 
was too short, too unsympathetic, and the print of 
American scenery upon his verse was 
too faint, for him to form an exception 
The exceptional river thub dwelt on 
and whose banks were habitual!) press 
ed by British poet-feet, is the SchuvlkiU 
River only : as for the poet, it is Tom- 
my Moore only. The laurels of this 
particular invader will haidly keep any 



.Ni.^'' 







UP THL bCHLYIKIIl 1 ROM COLUMBIA BRIDCJE. 



Themistocles of ouib fiom sleeping. But such 

as he was, Moore conquered the Schuylkill 

shores to the domain of literature, and laid them hot- 



" " _^ pressed and gilt-edged on every genteel centre-table 
in England. 
Doubtless the Dutch and negro dwellers by the river Vaal 
'^ in South Africa thought little of their stream until speculators 
•^ from afar came and showed its diamonds. For our own poor part 
^^''^ we had passed and repassed the basin of the Schuylkill in all kinds 

of diameters, and had always thought of it — may the muse of Romance forgive us 

22 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



23 



— rather commercially than aesthetically, 
when one day a party of bright beings 
from another sphere — Bostonians in fact 
— removed the scales from our eyes. 
These visitors, very prudish in regard to 




WISSAHICKON CREEK. 

landscape attractions, and very ready 
with a don t-touch-me ! toward any nov- 
el sensation that should come forward 
and try to impress them without a prop- 
er introduction, capitulated at once to 
Schuylkill, which indeed laid itself out 
with all its fascinations in their behalf. 



With us, too, it was holiday week, if we 
remember right, and the river was asso- 
ciated with liberty and recreation. There 
were maiden aunts in spectacles, like the 
maiden aunt in Tennyson's Princess; 
tall, smooth-haired, in- 
tensely grammatical 
girls from Cambridge ; 
and a mild, intelligent 
old man like a philos- 
opher, to bring all to- 
;4ether their fresh and 
candid eyes into criti- 
cism of the prospect, 
which to them seemed 
a scene in the far South. 
We need not say how 
easily, under such influ- 
ences, our week became 
a decameron. These 
hyperboreans from the 
Charles were never tired 
of praising the bowery 
perfection of Schuylkill 
beauty. Our decameron 
was passed — no matter 
low many Junes ago — 
n the very pride and 
)omp of early summer. 
The hilly shores were 
tufted with trees, every 
leaf of which, bursting 
with sap and crisp with 
rain and dew, danced in 
•he sunshine and twirled 
Is glossy side or its 
lowny side out to be 
idmired: mostimmacu- 
1 ite of rivers, the Schuyl- 
kill rolled its torrent of 
lewels between these 
dark-green banks — 
— _ l)anks where the leap- 
F- ^^^ 1 jng blood of Nature 
, —~^ ^ C seemed to throb every- 

where with riot of life 
and strength. The air, 
neither hot nor cold, but elastic with the 
cool crispness of morning, was respira- 
ble lusciousness : it was a delight to let 
it rattle through the linen draperies of 
summer-time. The bees hugged the 
flowers in the ladies' laps with their 
wiry legs. Everybody had bouquets 



24 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



and fruits : it seemed a picture of the 
immortal "Ladies' Garden" in the mas- 
terpiece of Boccaccio, whose "variety of 
plants, and how elegantly disposed, it 
would be needless to mention, since 
there was nothing belonging 
to our climate which was not 
there in great abundance. In 
the middle of this garden, what 
seemed more delightful than 
anything else, was a meadow 
the grass of a deep green 
spangled with a thousand flow 
eis and set round with trees 
... in the centre of this mea 
dow a fountain." The price 
less charm of Schuylkill V il 
ley in June was observed to 
be its limpid breath — an an 
seemingly borne from bloom 
ing vineyards in Val d'Arno 
and stimulating like wine 
The company from Boston 
used to the thinner, saltci 
breeze of the northerly coast, 
could not drink it eagerly 
enough. It was a treat to 
hear them praising this opu 
lent atmosphere and this Ital- 
ian river in that high-bred 
New England accent which 
has a sound of such distinction 
when heard amid the moie 
lazy dialects of the South 
And it was pleasant to find 
these fastidious blues, at Niag 
ara afterward, comparing tht. 
various delights of all then 
journey, and actually select 
ing this green bank of Schuvl 
kill as the " captain jewel of 
the carcanet." Memories of 
idle days so passed have a 
self- prolonging virtue ; and 
passing the same hills petrified to mar- 
ble in the snow, we find them retaining 
a fragrance of the remembered summer, 
and only seeming harsher as dried rose- 
leaves are harsher than a rose. 

The style of Thomas Moore, with ev- 
ery other word an adjective, is out of 
date at present. A sight of the Schuyl- 
kill does a great deal more for its repu- 
tation than all his epithets. There is 



something touching, however, when you 
get over the verbiage, in Moore's con- 
fession of loneliness and homesickness 
as he dwelt by the " flowery banks :" he 
recites, in the principal poem dedicated 







now, in 



VALLEY FUKGE. 

to the river, his restless pacings up and 
down the brink, feeling how far away 
dear London was, and the friends he 
loved there. Nothing reminded him of 
home, he says, until, coming to sing his 
own songs as he had sung them in many 
an English parlor, he found that fine 
American eyes would melt at his voice 
and his words as the eyes of London 
ladies had often melted before. No 
doubt this discovery of his uninterrupted 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



25 



power was exquisitely grateful : no won- 
der he blessed the tear that showed him 
how " like eyes he had loved was her 
eloquent eye : like them did it soften 
and weep at his song." Another of his 
Schuylkill poems describes a perfect 
wilderness. The land around "Tom 
Moore's Cottage" was not cleared sixty- 



seven years ago: he pictures the "lone 
little wood," the hollow beech with the 
woodpecker hammering at it, the spring 
shadowed by the sumach, the wild-fiow- 
er cradling the "voluptuous bee," the 
clump of elms completely hiding the 
house, which is only revealed by its curl 
of" smoke : in a cottage like this he in- 




SCHUYLKILL RIVER ABOVE POTTSTOWN. 



timates he would like a residence and 
"a maid." Moore was generally dis- 
pleased with what he saw of American 
democracy, which he thought showed 
"maturity in most of the vices," and a 
"strife between half- polished and half- 
barbarous life;" but he excepted from 
his strictures a little band of Philadelphia 
gentlemen, who, we suppose, were pro- 
ficient in "the tear" and in paying atten- 
tion to his songs ; and he wrote to the 
Hon. W. R. Spencer — 

Believe me, Spencer, while I winged the hours 
Where Schuylkill winds his way through banks of 

flowers, 
Though few the days, the happy evenings few, 
So warm with heart, so rich with mind they flew. 
That my charmed soul forgot the wish to roam. 
And rested there as in a dream of home. 

Such are the principal passages in which 
Feramorz celebrates the Schuylkill. Ev- 
ery visitor to Fairmount Park knows the 
homely little one-and-a-half-story hut in 
which he lived, the authenticity of which 
has never been creditably assailed. In 



his day, when the river was alive with 
fish, and the brawl of Schuylkill Falls, 
some two miles above, could be faintly 
heard in the moony nights, it must have 
been a pretty retreat for a prophet in 
search of a wilderness. 

The incessant trains of the Reading 
Railroad sweep near the cottage many 
times a day. They command, here at 
the easterly end of their route, the often- 
described scenery of Fairmount Reser- 
voir, the Park, and the Schuylkill thread- 
ed with quite a cat's-cradle of bridges. 
It is not every railroad that has the luck 
to have a great park for a depot. At 
Belmont Station one of the finest sweeps 
of the Park scenery is before the eye, 
while for foreground figures the heavy 
bronze groups of Pegasus and the Muses, 
originally intended for a Vienna theatre, 
stand on guard upon their twin pedestals. 
The river hereabout and hereabove is 
pent in by the brimming dam of the 
Waterworks, so as to look exactly like a 



26 



VIGNETTES EROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



lake. Into its broad, unruffled mirror 
dip the reflections of ancestral trees 
grown upon the old estates which com- 
pose the modern pleasure-ground, of the 
fanciful gables of the aquatic club-houses, 
and the arbors and monuments of that 
enormous garden. Then — sharp satire 
upon our diversions and pleasure- 
grounds ! — come the gardens of the 



dead, the cemeteries, where they take 
their leisure too, and go to rest from 
their labors : the sinister beauty of Laurel 
Hill, bristling with white obelisks among 
its over-cultivated bowers, is a terrible 
successor to Fairmount, like a moral 
tacked on to a ballad. 

The Falls of Schuylkill, which were 
brawling cataracts until 1816, when the 




SCHUYLKILL RIVER HELOW READING. 



level of the river was raised by the ob- 
struction at the Waterworks below, give 
their name to an old-fashioned village, 
the terminus of many a hard-fought trot- 
ting-match, at the convenient distance of 
four miles out from Philadelphia. Noth- 
ing more funnily quaint and antique- 
looking can be found in this country 
than the absurd little Old Falls House, 
a hostelry of the Middle Ages, broad 
and low, that stands forth and stares at 
the railway-train as though with arms 
akimbo : the richly-mossed and ancient 
bridge, too, that plants its gouty arches 
through the water, looks more like some 
feudal causeway over a Norman river 
than like anything American. The vil- 
lage at the Falls is in fact an anachro- 
nism, which basks upon the water, en- 
chanted and sleeping. One fancies the 
town squire as a kind of lazy King of 
Yvetot : he must be ruddy, round. 



paunchy, white-headed and exempt from 
death, his municipal duties confined to 
talking horse-talk with that race of men 
who spend their lives in trotting out from 
the city in light sulkies and in eating 
huge meals of catfish and coffee in the 
half a dozen old taverns that stud the 
bank with their walls and their dooryard 
trees. At this point comes purling into 
the Schuylkill that true artist's rivulet, 
Wissahickon, cold from the hills. It is 
almost unspoiled by civilization, its steep 
banks are plumed with pines, and it ex- 
pands, before losing itself in the larger 
current, into a bright broad stream, cov- 
ered in summer with festal boating-par- 
ties, and musical with whole orchestras 
of laughing girls ; then it curves grace- 
fully under the High Bridge and blends 
with Schuylkill, happy to have reflected 
so much human happiness before it dies. 
Townlets with the quaintest of names 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



27 



— Pencoyd, Manayunk, Conshohocken 
— intervene between the Falls and the 
site of Penn's old Manor at Norriton. 



These intrepid old settlements sit on the 
riverside like knitters in the sun, assidu- 
ously busy from morning till night, and 
making no end of shirtings and 
sheetings, paper and cloth; nor are 
their many -windowed walls unpic- 
^ turesque, up which the stain of 
^^^^^ the water creeps like a half- 
^j^^^"' guessed design in a mouldy 
^^^ fresco, while their mirrored 

"""^ y=rA reflections remind vou 




TUMBLING RUN. 



vaguely of moated chateaux in France 
or damp convents in Venice. 

A grimy Vulcan, who rolls a great 
deal of iron, is the city occupying 
William Penn's demesne at Norriton, 
changed by modern usage to Norris- 
lown. The site is celebrated mostly 
for its industries, but there are beautiful 
views in the hills around ; the soil from 
here back to Plymouth is enriched with 
statuary marble, breccia marbles and 
limestone ; and the town, as centre to a 
very old and prosperous farming region, 
yields many a reminiscence and history. 
The county (Montgomery) has still a 



German-speaking population in its north- 
ern part, descendants of families that 
have not budged for two hundred years. 
It is near here that Mrs. Gibbons, the 
historian of the Pennsylvania Germans, 
finds her most eastwardly settlement of 
strange and humble religionists. The 
Schwenckfelder community is settled 
some seven miles out of Norristown, 
where its members practice the mild 
tenets of their European founder. Here, 
in their ancient and treasured volumes, 
they keep the engraved portrait of their 
prophet, dignified in furred robes and 
patriarchal beard descending on his 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



breast. Caspar Schwenckfeldt, a noble- 
man of Silesia, was born in 1490, and 
originated a religion of quietism before 
the Quakers, and a policy of non-resist- 
ance anterior to Fox : his followers fur- 
nished many emigrants to the American 
shores, and these strayed with their com- 
patriots into Pennsylvania. The dwin- 
dled remnant of the sect, a sort of Ger- 
man-speaking Quakers, lead humble 
pastoral lives in this beautiful region, 
their very existence as a church having 
heretofore escaped the knowledge of 



those who are curious in American re- 
ligions. 

A parallel branch of our railroad runs 
up the river on its northerly side, and 
ends here at Norristown : the Reading 
Railway proper travels up the south 
bank, only crossing the river at Phoenix- 
ville. The river-scenery becomes finer 
as we leave the thriving hamlets that ex- 
tend westwardly, like a chaplet of beads, 
from Philadelphia, and form a part of 
its gigantic industries. As Nature begins 
to assert her sway over the more distant 




MOUNT CARBON. 



wateib of our chosen river, the charm becomes more 
distmctly sylvan or bucolic. The current slips through 
a green gaiden, idle as a ribbon that lies on a beauty's 
^ lap, and all is like a dream of contentment. Valley Forge 
__ "" lies east of Phoenixville, opposite to the mouth of Perkiomen 
~ Creek, which runs into the river with a babble of Pennsylvania 

Dutch, caught up the country among the Mennonites and Bunkers. The ideas 
that spread abroad hereabouts, and exert themselves in the tillage of the soil, are 
ideas that are older than the American Revolution : the local intellect, the plod- 
ding German mind, has hardly advanced for a century ; yet there is no recollection 
in tlie landscape of those heroic times, and the buttercups laugh insolently where 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



29 



Washington's famished heroes tracked 
the snows with their bare feet. 

There is nothing so fine in Ameri- 
can story, nothing so admirable in Wash- 
ingtonian biography, as the episode of 
Valley Forge. The patriotism that en- 
dures is a finer thing than the patriot- 
ism that acts. The men who bore fam- 



ine and pestilence here without mutiny 
were worthy of the general who was 
enduring, at the same place and time, 
the calumnies of the conspirators at 
Reading and the intrigues of Gates and 
Lee for his overthrow. Hereabouts, 
William Penn named some of the hills 
as Adam named the beasts, only with 




r.ERMANTOWN VALLEY. 



a more jocular intention. Having lost 
his way on one hill and recovered it on 
another, he named them Mount Pleas- 
ant and Mount Misery — names they re- 
tain to this day, and names applied by 
Washington, who never joked for his 
part. 

We pass through Pottstown and Doug- 
lassville, and cross near their mouths the 
Manatawny and Monocacy Creeks. The 
river seems to grow more brilliant inch 
by inch. Finally, three great hills, Mount 
i'enn. Mount Washington and Mount 
Neversink, converge together to make a 
handsome shelter for a town, and here 
■he river, after twisting into several 
cur\es and loops, straightens out and 
Introduces the city of Reading. 

A city of modern ideas, and of the 
:astes and wants created by wealth, set 
in the midst of a rural population par- 



ticularly marked with ignorance, — such 
is Reading, like Paley's famous watch 
throbbing with contrivance and energy 
in the midst of the common. Surround- 
ed by all the dull calm of Pennsylvanian 
Germany, this centre of art and com- 
merce is itself a focus of animation, with 
a social grade derived from the times 
when the first people of the country fled 
hither during the Revolutionary period, 
and held a republican court while the 
British menaced Philadelphia. It was 
laid out in 1748 by Thomas and Richard 
Penn, the Proprietaries. The world of 
mineral wealth which it now distributes 
was unknown to these town - planters, 
but they were not blind to its position 
as a commercial strategic point. When, 
half a century after the Revolution, the 
assignees of the Penn family attempted 
to collect the ground-rents which had 



3° 



VIGNETTES EROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



been originally reserved and afterward 
neglected, great was the dismay in 
Reading — stout resistance on the part 
of the citizens, threats of breaking up 
the local titles from the claimants, and 
desperate diplomacy from the city au- 
thorities, all resulting at last in com- 
promise and peace. The imperiled pa- 
triots who sought an asylum in Reading 
while Washington was in 
his utmost extremity at 
the Forge (and who, in- 
deed, quickly began plot- 
ting for his removal from 
command), — these ar- 
dent revolutionists found 
themselves in a place 
which had been bedeck 
ed by the loyal founders 
with every monarchic 
symbol : King street, 
Queen street, Prince 
street, Duke street, Eail 
street, were the signs 
painted on the very a\ 
enues where they walked 
to air their rebellious 
thoughts. These feudal 
names remained so late 7' 
as 1833, when they weie - 
changed, "as more com- 
patible with the republi- 
can simplicity of our 
present form of government, 
form went to lengths less commendable, 
even to changing names of streets like 
that called after Hannah Callowhill, the 
second wife of William Penn : it ex- 
hausted itself, too, in reducing the streets 
to namelessness : it could not invent new 
cognomens. This is the constant con- 
fession of weakness made by civic au- 
thorities in America, who seem to be 
especially destitute of imagination : in a 
hundred places besides Reading, when 
called on for a similar suit of nomencla- 
ture, their invention gives out — they are 
unable to name the streets, and are 
obliged to number them. 

There are the loveliest imaginable 
drives and excursions to be taken in the 
Reading vicinity. We would point out, 
as we pass along, the spots particularly 
attractive to the excursionist ; but the 



danger at Reading will be that he may 
cease to be an excursionist and become 
a fixture. This was the case, we recol- 
lect, with a young lady of fashion who 
passed through the place a year ago with 
her just-accepted affinity. The bridal 
tour included the stoppage for a day at 
Reading : in the afternoon a short drive 
was proposed, and in that drive the par- 




Mi\L 1111 1 



The re- 



ticular charm of the spot found time to 
do its work. The bride, fresh as she was 
from Paris and Switzerland, found boule- 
vards to her liking in the city and heights 
to her taste on the mountains around it. 
Schuylkill River sang the epithalamium 
of that bridal, for the intended pause of a 
day was prolonged to many weeks. Such 
are the arts of this poet-river to retain 
those who once listen and linger. 

Reading is laid out on the chessboard 
pattern of Philadelphia, recalling Quaker 
formalism in the rectangularity of every 
street-corner. The Friends settled it first, 
indeed, and worshiped here in a log ca- 
thedral so early as 1750. The early man- 
ners were practical and simple. One 
Daniel Boas was applied to for a plan 
on which to build his house : he got a 
forge-hammer and handed it to the ar- 
chitect. " Build my house in the shape 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



31 



of this,' 
put up, 




' he said to the surprised functionary ; and the Forge-hammer House was 
to surprise the neighbors and instruct posterity, exactly in the figure of a 

blacksmith's tool. 

Daniel Boas's forge-hammer has expanded since then in a 

wonderful way. The city is now a forge of industry in many 

different kinds, the best representative of 

Its thrift bcmg the railroad company's car- 
shops and locomotive-works. The car- 

building shop is an enormous hall, big 

enough for a whole city to dance in, yet 

dedicated to work as fine in its finish as 

the joiner\ of a woman's jewel-box. In 

the locomotive-works you see the usual 





LOWt-R CURDUN I LANh. 



■scene of impressive activity and clamor, 
■with the cylinders intended for mighty 
•engines humbly submitting to be pared 
into shape in a lathe ; with cavernous 
boilers opening their rusty bowels to the 
skill of the repairer ; monstrous ham- 
mers falling like thunderbolts ; and 
black dwarfs of machines, with iron 
bones and refined motions, able to pare 
steel into ribbons or to turn out a finish- 
ed implement with one tap of a polished 
finger-nail. The Philadelphia and Read- 
ing railroad might be imagined as end- 
ing in this city, but the town of Reading 
is but the beginning of a career for it 
and its score of branches : from hence 



it sends out feelers — west, to the coal 
country ; north, to the Lehigh River at 
Allentown ; and southwardly, to the State 
capital. In the western suburb of Read- 
ing a very brilliant-looking terminus has 
been built to receive these branch roads: 
almost too ornamental for a railroad- 
depot, the building spreads over the 
ground in a triangle of curved galleries, 
looking like a summer theatre, and pret- 
tily carved and painted. 

As we pass up the river from Reading 
the farm-lands begin gradually to strug- 
gle with the mountains, the latter getting 
a final victory, with, of course, an ad- 
vantage in the way of picturesqueness 



32 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



Presently the railway pierces Mount Kit- 
tatinny, and emerges at Port Clinton, a 
town laid out in 1829. It is in the fork 
of the Schuylkill and Little Schuylkill 
Rivers — streams which rise not far apart 
among the coal-hills, and describe two 
great curves to meet at Port Clinton, 
there uniting their arms full of moun- 
tains, like some bold Titanic marauder 
caught with les poiiimes du voisin. Port 
Clinton, provided with an antique-look- 
ing and wonderfully sketchable railway- 
station, and a nursery of young ever- 
greens in the foreground, looks up at the 
hilltops and down into the double river 
and torpid canal, rather idly lamenting 
the day when railroads were not and the 
canal was all in all. We are now com- 
pletely in the toils of the mountains. 
From this confluence of the Schuylkills, 
away over to the opposite site of Cata- 
wissa on the Susquehanna River, the 
country is rolled into mountain-chains 
like breakers on the sea-beach. The 
Water-Gap of the Blue Mountain is just 
below us. Several of the spurs of the 
range show us their buttes, angular and 
clearly profiled, with the river coiling be- 
neath them, in a dozen miles from Port 
Clinton. Then the giants of the Appa- 
lachian ranks appear — the river is no 
longer able to steal a passage across 
their broken ends, but is turned sharply 



down from between two parallel ridges 
— and the railroad likewise ceases to 
maintain its direct westward course, and 
begins to penetrate the long valleys with 
a series of branches, seeking for coal as 
the fibres of a root will seek for nourish- 
ment. This peculiar knot of streams, 
valleys and road-junctions, twisting to- 
gether under the shadow of mighty hills, 
has its group of neighboring towns, like- 
wise prone in the mountain-hollows— 
Palo Alto, Schuylkill Haven, Mount Car- 
bon, and especially Pottsville. 

We found Reading antique and mem- 
orable : the founding of it was a last 
effort of the old Quaker rule pushed out 
into the Indian wilderness. But 1824 
came with its Argonauts ; the woods 
were filled with seekers after that curious 
black stone which people said would 
burn ; the California of '49 was antici- 
pated in Pennsylvania ; some pioneer 
laid out in the western part of the State 
the mushroom village which Dickens 
saw afterward and described as " Eden '* 
in Martin Chiizzlewit ; and here, at the 
head of the Schuylkill, in the mania of 
speculative fever, a city spurted into life 
out of the fire of John Putt's smelting-fur- 
nace. Two civilizations created the two 
not distant towns — that, the mission of 
Penn and the seventeenth century ; this, 
the mission of Mammon and the nine- 




LORBERRY JUNCTION. 



teenth. Poet Moore, telling how much 
he "knew by the smoke that so grace- 
fully curled," had very little to tell : the 
fires of a million chimneys were lying 



latent in Schuylkill's mountain - cradle, 
but it brought him no such report. 

John Putt (or Pott) built Greenwood 
Furnace in 1827, a coal-vein being re- 



VIGNETTES EROM THE SCnUYLKlLL VALLEY. 



33 



vealed in digging the foundation. The city which arose on 
the site was called Putt's-ville, from his father, 
Wilhelm Putt, who came to America in 1734, 
in the ship St. Andrew, from Rotterdam. 
Pottsville is still peopled \\ ith the de- 
scendants of the famih , sonic of whom 
grew rich by simpl) takmg land and 
holding it for a rise 
in value. It ^^ 

is to be 



«^ 




VIKW hiEAR bkOOKSlDE. 

notid as a singular fact that individuals 
or private firms have not generally been 
successful in the business of coal-mining. 
The market is too uncertain, the strikes 
among the workmen too capricious and 
frequent, the various risks too damaging, 
to be averaged with success on a small 
scale. Tne oottom of the sea is not 
strewn so thickly with sunken argosies 
as these mountains with the wrecks 
of private fortunes. The individuals 
who have made money were those who 
sold land to speculators, but the small 
3 



mincis have gone 
undci, and monop- 
oh alone seems to 
be competent to 
deal with such vast 
machinery and such 
armies of turbulent 
operatives. 
The description of this 
business, however, is not 
our affair this month : we aim simply 
to lead the reader through the gently- 
rising channels of Schuylkill Valley, 
and show him what admirable tourist- 
routes the anthracite country will yield. 
The trade of a place like Pottsville is 
only suited to our present purpose 
when it is so old a story as to be a rem- 
iniscence. As Moore was too early in 
the field to be in anywise conscious of 
coal, let us hear the humorist Joseph C. 
Neal, who was present in the full hurly- 
burly of the mining excitement. Here 
are some of his sentences : 

"In the memorable year to which 1 
allude rumors of fortunes made at a 
blow, and competency secured by a turn 
of the fingers came whispering down the 
Schuylkill. Every speculator had his 
town laid out, and many of them had 



34 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



scores of towns. They were, to be sure, 
located in the pathless forests, but the 
future Broadways and Pall Malls were 
marked upon the trees ; and it was an- 
ticipated that the time was not far dis- 
tant when the bears, deer and wild-cats 
would be obliged to give place, and take 
the gutter side of the belles and beaux 



of the new cities. The other branch of 
our adventurers turned their attention to 
mining. To it they went, boring the 
mountains, swamping their money and 
themselves. The hills swarmed with 
them, they clustered like bees about a 
hive, but not a hope was realized. The 
justices did a fine business. Capiases, 




SUSQUEHANNA RIVER NEAR HERNDON. 



securities and bail-pieces became as fa- 
miliar as your gaiter. The farce was 
over, and the farce of T/ie Devil to Pay 
was the afterpiece. There was but one 
step from the sublime to the ridiculous, 
and Pottsville saw it taken." 

The Pottsville of to-day, a town of 
great elegance, has not its guide-boards 
set up in an impenetrable forest. Every- 
thing shows wealth, ambition and those 



exacting tastes that come in the train of 
satisfied ambition. The goods in the 
stores are choice and high-priced : each 
building erected is handsomer than the 
last. The streets, climbing actively up 
from the river, are sometimes picturesque, 
always gay and bright. Sharp Moun- 
tain drives its vast obtuse wedge into the 
sky behind the town. Henry Clay on a 
column, with a whole hill for a pedestal 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



35 



looks amiably over the comfortable pop- 
ulation of old-line Whigs who roost and 
burrow in the fat offices and places of 
the town. Fine roads for driving wind 
back among the hills, with superb turns 
of view, with dusky villages of miners, 
and a breadth and choice of mining-sce- 
nery that makes the whole of this strange 
trade unwind before the visitor like a 
drama. There is a little theatre in the 
city, with a fair stage for the fortuitous 
concert-troupe or star. Hotel-life is at 
the level of the highest dreams of the 
commercial traveler. There is at least 
one preacher of conspicuous power. 
Dr. Smiley of the Second Presbyterian 
Church — a man with a true gift of ex- 
temporaneous eloquence, a sort of White- 
field with the hills for his amphitheatre. 
It is a strange surprise to find such a 
city, an edifice of refinement, culture and 
brightness, reposing on the shoulders of 




the grimy miners, who are its true cary- 
atides and supports. 

Mount Carbon, a continuation of Potls- 
ville, is celebrated only for its hotel, a 
house owned by the railroad company, 
and the scene of many a noble feast at 
which the corporation was the entertain- 
er. There are rare wines in stock here, 
chosen by experts in such matters, and 
the kitchen is adorned by the genius 
of cooks worthy of Apicius's service : 
this house of call, the "Mansion," is 
large and handsome, making a good 
effect as it stands like a carving in alto 
relief against the green face of Sharp 
Mountain. Not far away are the hy- 
draulics of Tumbling Run, where there 
is a pretty lake, with dams to feed the 
canal, the waste water escaping over the 
rocks in such a way as to form a fine 
cascade. 

It is easily understood that the laying 
out of railway- 
levels among 
these intricate 
valleys must 
be a difficult 
feat of civil en- 
gineering. Let 
the tourist 
thank the en- 
gineer with all 
his soul, then, 
as he pene- 
trates by his 
aid to ravines 
almost inac- 
cessible by oth- 
er means, and 
grasps in a 
day's idling a 
quantity of dis- 
tant points that 
Natty Bumpo 
could hardly 
compass in a 
month with his leathern legs. The com- 
merce of anthracite seems hereabouts to have 
acted in a kind conspiracy with the desires 
of the sight-seer, for nowhere is there a grace- 
ful opening in the view but a road seems to 
lead straight up to it, while there is generally 
provided for the foreground a colossal coal- 
breaker heavily dusted with sooty powder. 



36 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



presenting the general semblance of 
Cleopatra's needle hung with black vel- 
vet, and capital for throwing off the dis- 
tance into aerial perspective. 

We will leave the Schuylkill now, with 
the graceful image of Pottsville reflected 
in it, in order to give the artist's pencil a 
short excursion amongst the Appalachian 
valleys ; reserving the privilege, howev- 
er, of returning to Pottsville as a centre 
of movement or pivotal focus, and also 
tliat of taking up the river, if we shall 
so choose, and going backward with it 
quite to its fountain-head. Having en- 
joyed a long succession of river-scenes, 
let us turn to the panorama of the moun- 
tains as mining industry has opened it 
out to our approach. From Pottsville, 
then, we may take the locomotive over 
a quantity of short mining-roads which 
burrow away the coal-hills, or can com- 
mand a series of feeders which go out 
from the same centre with a certain par- 
allelism, like the prongs of a fork, to 
touch various coal-depots on the Susque- 
hanna, such as Herndon (a small water- 
side town below Sunbury) and Dauphin. 
Westward lie Ashland, Shamokin and 
the bold opening of Ravino Gap. Near 
Ashland you are carried over the Upper 
and Lower Inclined Planes of Gordon, 
two uphill inclinations of the road oc- 
curring close together. The Schuylkill 
region employs four of these planes, 
similar in operation to that which has 
become so celebrated at Mauch Chunk 
in ascending Mount Pisgah. The sen- 
sation of being caught by the little "bar- 
ney" engine which starts up behind you 
at the foot of the hill, and pushes you 
smartly up the rope, is quite odd and 
magical to a stranger. The Lower Gor- 
don Plane, represented in the cut, carries 
you a distance of 4755 feet, in which dis- 
tance you have risen 404 feet, and are 
1206 feet above tide; the neighboring 
Upper Plane, somewhat shorter in length, 
takes you up to a still greater altitude, 
leaving you 1519 feet above tide ; so that, 
although on the rail all the time, you 
have the height of a very respectable 
mountain beneath you. Bearing in a 
more southerly direction, an excursion 
may be taken that will unveil a variety 



of wonders, both mechanical and natural. 
Leave Pottsville, take up its neighbor 
Mount Carbon and Mount Carbon's 
neighbor Schuylkill Haven, then double, 
and proceed by the Mine Hill road, a 
branch originally built independently, 
now absorbed by the Reading Company. 
You get the bold vase-like hollow and 
the swimming distances of Germantown 
Valley and Mine Hill Gap. At Cressona 
you remark the monumental buildings in 
stone put up by the Mine Hill road when 
itwas an independent corporation. Lor- 
berry Junction commands a fine valley- 
view, but it is eclipsed by the neighbor 
view of Brookside, across Williams Val- 
ley. Here, while the disgorging mines 
pile up their dust-heaps all around you, 
and the dull mules clamber to the lofty 
breakers with their loads of coal, the 
eye commands a distance which is full 
of enchantment. The direction of the 
valley is so straight that you are sure 
you can see all the way down to the Sus- 
quehanna River at Harrisburg. Along 
the vista the inequalities of the parallel 
mountain-walls jut out one beyond the 
other, forming accents of fainter and 
fainter blue, in an interminable perspec- 
tive, until everything faints in an horizon 
of blinding azure and silver. In the 
foreground, relieved in dark saliency 
agajnst the dazzling vision, are the ears 
of a mule and the profile of a dust-heap, 
black as a coffin under a pall. It is a 
painter's opportunity, for toil and vision, 
the practical and the ideal, are most art- 
fully blended. 

In our next paper we shall have 
something to say about the vicissitudes 
of a miner's existence and of the coal- 
mining industry, on which depend the 
comfort and life of myriads each winter; 
and, having got the reader completely 
lost to the friendly light of day in the 
deepest recesses of a mine, it will be our 
business to get him out, and return him 
to his friends with some novelty of route, 
not, however, completely losing sight of 
the exquisite Schuylkill. The object in 
the present paper has been quite uncon- 
nected with the special commerce of the 
Reading road : we have undertaken a 
vague relaxation of mind and matter, 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



37 



not the toil of mines and mattocks. We 
wished to demonstrate that, in its irre- 
sponsible aspect of a mere tourist's route, 



the valley of Schuylkill is full of historic 
interest and pictorial beauty. 




FALLS BRIDGE, SCHUYLKILL RIVER. 



THE great carrier which moves the 
passengers and the products of the 
Schuylkill Valley — the Reading Railroad 
— is no common organization. It is the 
factor of two interests unique on the con- 
tinent — the iron industry of Pennsylvania 
and the anthracite commerce of the same 
State. It thus happens that the corpora- 



tion engaged in assisting the most un- 
wieldy products known to commerce into 
their proper place and relation with the 
market is mixed in with the business of 
manufacturing to a far greater degree 
than is usual with a common carrier. 
In fact, this organization is a manufac- 
turer. It was in 1871 that it began to 



3« 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



be a producer, buying ninety thousand 
acres of coal-lands and preparing for the 
smelting of iron on a great scale, the 
road creating and taking all the stock in 
an organization styled the Philadelphia 
and Reading Coal and Iron Company. 

It is both a porter and a workman. 
Do you ask to see the porter ? — it shows 
you its hands — half a million blackened 
hands rolling twenty thousand tons of 
iron per year at Reading, sculpturing the 
coal-mountains into honeycomb or melt- 
ing ore in giant furnaces into the most 
precious of the metals : you are evident- 
ly looking at a manufacturer. Do you 
ask to see the manufacturer ? — this same 



two-faced railroad corporation shows you 
its wagons and its automaton teams, shows 
the freight-trains reddened with iron ore, 
shows the broken coal pouring down a 
hundred mountain-sides into its cars as 
incessantly as the sands in an hourglass, 
and finally shows the heavy mineral scat- 
tered to distant seaports over the unstal)le 
Atlantic : you are beholding a simple 
porter, it would seem. This porter was 
measured in 1870, and proved to be sin- 
gularly well supplied with muscles and 
sinews : the Reading Railroad's cars and 
rolling apparatus, placed end to end, 
made a train fifty-five miles in length. 
As a workman its exhibit could be stated 





'^^^^'^'^il^.. 



VIEW ON THE SUSQUEHANNA OPPOSnE CATAWIbSA 



m an equally sensational way. Porter 
and workman, it shows a singular clev- 
erness in taking advantage of a perfect- 



ly exceptional state of things, for no 
other kinds of product than the great 
Pennsylvania products would invite their 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



39 



carrier to come in and lend a hand to 
the work at fair wages. The company 
is at once a passenger and tourist Hne, a 
freight line, a coal and iron company, 



and even a parcels-express company. 
It may be said to relieve the moun- 
tains of their loads of imprisoned fire, 
as Hercules relieved Atlas of the weight 





M\iN\ iLi h \\ \ri r c \p 



of the Zodiac ; and it holds up for mor- 
tals an endless zone of artificial sum- 
mer full of that heat which mortals are 
feigned to have stolen from Heaven. 
' It carries the tropics to our doors," says 
Emerson, speaking of anthracite, and by 
imphcation of the purveyor that provides 
us with it. 

Its functions and disposition give this 
line a rather odd figure on the map : you 
would think of some miner, stunted and 
distorted with lying in a narrow vein, 
and showing a short trunk and sprawling 
limbs. The " Philadelphia and Reading 



Railroad," if its extent were defined by 
its name, would be only a matter of a 
hundred miles long, for that is the dis- 
tance between the two cities ; but wait 
until the milliped exhibits all its feelers. 
The Reading corporation, adding what 
it leases or controls to what it owns, dis- 
plays seven hundred and twenty -five 
miles of road ; and over all this length, ar- 
ranged in almost mnumerable branches, 
go spinning the active coal and iron with 
involuntary alertness, as the cannon-ball 
circulates over the undulating muscles of 
an acrobat's arms and breast. 



40 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



It was in 1858 that the managers in- 
augurated their poUcy of absorbing the 
lateral roads : they began with the Leb- 
anon Valley Railroad, as it is called, a 
branch which extends from Reading 
through Lebanon to Harrisburg, and en- 
tered into competition with the Pennsyl- 
vania Central in the rather greasy task 
of dumping Philadelphia politicians into 
Harrisburg by a line some eight miles 
longer than the Central's. This we men- 
tion, not because we are going to under- 
take the list of our company's acquisi- 
tions, with the dates, but because the 
branch in question will afford us a jolly 
excursion under the pretence of strictly 
attending to the business of this article. 
It will take us to iron at the wonderful 
Cornwall Ore -Banks, but it will afford 
us, too, a fine escapade, clear away from 
the Schuylkill Valley, through Pennsyl- 
vania Dutchland, to Harrisburg and the 
Susquehanna. Having thus tasted the 
sweets of truancy, it is our plan to fly up 
the Susquehanna River, for a delightful 
distance, to a point on the Catawissa 



road, and by this romantic path descend 
again upon the coal-fields and the Schuyl- 
kill. The detour is a little bold, since 
the latter river and its coal were to be 
the special subjects of our present paper; 
but a road with so many branches as the 
Reading invites to this kind of faithless 
ness ; and we mean to be short, and at- 
tend to the miners in a very little time. 

This is our best scheme, indeed, for 
grasping the advantages of the Reading 
road in all their breadth. We are going 
to take the two stems of a Y. The one 
branch is the Lebanon Valley, the other 
is the Catawissa : Reading City lies at 
the fork, the Reading Railroad proper is 
the stem ; and in the angle of that Y is 
embraced all that we are going to con- 
sider of the coal production of Schuvl- 
kill Valley. 

We leave Reading, then, the technical 
extremity of the parent-road, and begin 
to travel due west through the gently- 
rolling farm-country of Berks and Leba- 
non counties. It is not romantic, like 
the valley of Schuylkill ; nevertheless, a 




RAVINE AND HEAVY GRADE NEAR KRACKVILLE. 



I 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



41 



^ <**ji^«-,^ 




long continuous eminence 
called South Mountain bears 
up below us, and keeps in 
sight like a rampart as we 
trace it from the car -win- 
dows, separating us from 
Conestoga Creek and its affluents, and 
from the region of Ephrata and Lan- 
caster. The towns lying on either side 
our path are half or wholly German 
in name, sometimes perpetuating fondly 
the homesickness of those who called 
them after well -beloved spots in the 
Fatherland. Heidelberg, Womelsdorf, 
Wohlebcrtown lie around us, and farther 
off in these same counties are Naftzinger- 
ville, Rehrersburg, Strausstown and Mil- 
bach, which last doubtless was originally 
Miihlbach. The people who come into 
the cars from the small stations are as 
strange-looking as if from the antipodes. 
Two or three women enter, gently laugh- 
ing and talking among themselves in 
unknowable language, but for all their 
gayety looking as if they have great 
need of protection from the wiles of a 
corrupt world. They are dressed in nar- 
row suits of black and deep tunnel-like 



bonnets, homemade — bonnets black as 
Erebus, with an enormous cape falling 
over the shoulders, slats of cardboard 
sewn into the stuff so as to form the cyl- 
inder, and the crown gathered neatly to a 
button in the centre. This kind of bon- 
net shades the rosy, laughing face. One 
of them carries a boy, a chubby, apple- 
cheeked, blond-headed Teuton, in whose 
pretty lips the outlandish Pennsylvania 
Dutch is greatly softened, and whose 
suit of clothes has a general look of 
having been made by Japhet's wife in 
the ark. To protect the child and its 
mother sits a simple, square-bodied man 
of forty, with the red, innocent face of 
a boy, a mop of touzled yellow hair, 
apple -wood buttons and homemade 
clothes : he is more German than a Ber- 
liner, for he and his have been away 
from German progress for centuries, 
sticking like stocks where they were 



42 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



planted. The goods of this family are 
carried in sacks resembling meal-bags. 
Other passengers of the same general 
appearance enter — one an old man 
whose gray locks tumble over his shoul- 
ders, whose long beard wags like a goat's, 
and whose principal garment is an all- 
embracing army overcoat. These elder 
personages wear felt hats, drab or brown, 
with very wide brims curling up evenly 
all around, and seeming to have been 
turned in lathes or run into moulds like 
car-wheels. These are the mild Penn- 
sylvania Germans. They are about as 
aggressive as rabbits ; yet as a rabbit will 
always find some frog or other to be afraid 
of it, so these families of the Palatinate 
caused apprehension, when they came 
over a hundred and fifty years ago, to 
the wary and unwarlike Quakers. "We 
have of late," wrote James Logan, the 
secretary of the province, in 1717, "a 
great number of Palatines poured in 



upon us without any recommendation or 
notice, which gives the country some 
uneasiness." They never made much , 
trouble, however, in the pacific commu- 
nity. They simply took to fertilizing the 
English language with their own, pro- 
ducing in the end that wonderful patois 
which now distinguishes the region. 
These are the trustful beings who still 
vote for General Jackson, and who, be- 
lieving that Governor Ritner perpetually 
wields the sceptre of the State, sing com- 
plimentarily, 

Der Joseph Ritner is der mon 
As unser Staat rigeren Icon ! 

They are the natural enemies of prog- 
ress : even coal, the theme of all our 
present panegyric, the beneficent and 
indispensable, they look at with some 
distrust, as if it were a gift from the pow- 
ers below. The warmth to which this 
primitive race gives its truest welcome is 
the natural heat of the sun, the halo of 




MAHANOY PLANi. (LOOKING DOWNJ 



gently-stealing mildness that comes in 
spring, when the Pennsylvania peasant- 
girl may pause at her ploughing in the 



mild weather, and listen to a few tender 
words from her blue-coated farmer-lad. 
A country Sappho of the race. Miss Ra- 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



43 




hel Bann of \ ork count) 
makes this naive little con 
fession resembling at once 
a yawn and a smile 

Well, anyhow, wann's Frueyoh'r 

kummt. 
Bin ich gepleased first-rate ! 

Some of these communities are very 
ascetic. When the Brethren established 
themselves at Ephrata in 1730, they first 
lived as solitaries : then they put up their 
wooden monasteries, shingled to the 
ground. The sisters occupied one large 
convent, the brothers another. Here are 
to be still seen the apparatus of morti- 
fication — the narrow cells with a plank 
for a bed, the doors just the size of a 
coffin-lid, the halls so straitened that two 
persons cannot pass. The large Saals 
are almost completely papered with the 
FractKr-schriften, or texts in penman- 
ship, in which pictorial art vies with in- 
genious chirography to explain the path 
to heaven. 

Presently the Snitz Creek winds down 
from the iron hills, and makes a turn 
close to where the railroad stretches 
along. This is the site of Lebanon. As 
we approach Lebanon through the thriv- 
ing farms, many a 

Mennonist his bearded chin 
Leans o'er the gate 

of the dooryard, and several of them 
are bending their unkempt heads over 
the German newspapers in the Lebanon 
hotel. They sit round the table d'hote 
in their faded homespun dress, and there 



TUNNEL COLLIERY. 

they partake, with more polished guests, 
of the characteristic fare belonging to 
the region. The old German style of 
serving dinner is to set a vast number 
of viands in little saucers contemporane- 
ously before the eater. Fourteen platters 
were in front of us at once when we last 
dined at Lebanon, and the same number 
before each sitter at the long table. The 
plate of crimson beef formed the central 
luminary, around which a dozen vege- 
tables and side-dishes performed their 
orbit; among them, it is unnecessary to 
say, the Pennsylvanian smeer-case and 
kohl-slah and apple-bititer. 

What has brought us to Lebanon is 
the Cornwall iron deposits, the great 
metallic curiosities of the State. Here 
are three mountains made of iron and 
lying close together. They are inferior 
knobs of the great South Mountain, an 
elevation which stretches in a straight 
line from the Schuylkill to the Susque- 
hanna, and they lie six miles out from 
Lebanon. They are respectively called 
Grassy Hill, Middle Hill and Big Hill : 
the iron is quite on the surface, forming 
a deposit of three hundred and twenty- 
five feet depth in the higher parts, and 
thinning out on the edges of the hills. The 
iron mass covers a hundred acres, and, 
though it has been worked for more than 



44 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



a century, seems almost inexhaustible, as 
the deeper treasure remains untouched. 
It rests upon trap-rock, the division be- 
tween the two being so sharp that you 
could slip in a visiting-card, which would 
be touched on one side by the pure trap 
and on the other by the almost pure iron. 
The lumps of pure richness which stud 
the mass — black nodules about the size 
of a skull, and known as negro-heads — 
are almost unadulterated iron, only three 
parts in seven being of foreign matter. 
Many of these negro-heads have the prop- 
erties of loadstone, being of the species 
of ore called magnetic, and one of them 
will sustain a string of six tenpenny nails 
hanging one to the other. The removal 
of this rich dirt is the simplest thing con- 
ceivable : it is not mined, nor even quar- 
ried, but is merely shoveled like garden- 
mould from the hilltop, and carried by 
trams to the furnaces that gape for it 
in the valley below. The ascent of the 
principal mount, now largely shoveled 
away, is very interesting. A neat little 
dummy engine, provided with seats and 
elegant cushions, is puffing away at the 
base : its benches are inclined at an 
angle with the wheels, like the cars that 
go up Mount Washington, so that the 
steep slope of the road is corrected and 
the passenger sits on a level base. The 
railway is laid out in a perfect spiral, 
winding around the symmetrical dome 
of the hill in convolutions as regular as 
those of a snail-shell : you fancy your- 
self ascending Dante's hill of Purgatory 
— a translation in which the part of the 
fair Beatrice is played by the obliging 
superintendent of the excavations. Noth- 
ing can well be stranger than the sensa- 
tion of flying up this spiral with the speed 
of steam, like a morning lark ascending 
to Heaven's gate, with the landscape be- 
neath returning upon itself as you com- 
plete each concentric circle. It would 
puzzle the best topographer to tell east 
from west after repeating these gyrations 
again and again and resting at last on 
the summit of the mount, with the peace- 
ful Lebanon farm-landscape beneath, and 
a circle of great furnace-chimneys wav- 
ing their plumes of smoke against the 
background. The workmen are busy 



with pick and shovel loading into small 
cars the friable ore. Intermixed with the 
iron are various mineral curiosities, the 
most valuable of which is copper. The 
combinations of copper afford the bold- 
est and most brilliant colors, from pure 




ultramarine blue to the fresh flash of the 
virgin copper itself, which sometimes lies 
pressed in the rock-fissures in brilliant 
leaf-like plates, as if a sprig of Hercules' 
golden bough had been laid away by 
Nature to dry in her great /tortus siccus. 
A fine cabinet of minerals embellishes 
the superintendent's office in his residence 
below, embracing all the ores of copper 
and iron, with the various geological ac- 
companiments which occur with them. 

In the six-mile drive between the Corn- 
wall Ore-Banks and Lebanon we have 
pointed out the various farming improve- 
ments, including the grand plantations 
of members of the Coleman family, who 
own the Banks. These millionaires are 
fanciers of rare cattle, and on their farms 
we see the flocks of Southdowns, the rare 
breeds of swine, the Alderney cows — 
themselves almost solid mines of cream 
— and, handsomest of all, the Holstein 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



45 



bulls, large animals with coats of gleam- 
ing black satin, except for the saddle of 
pure white, which hangs over the back 




like a rich and sharply-defined coverlet 
of ermine or samite. The city of Leba- 
non is of brick, formal, old-fashioned 
and evidently comfortable, and paved in 
some places with a sort of octagonal tile 
made cheaply enough by simply running 
the refuse slag of the iron-furnaces into 
moulds conveniently laid beneath the 
vent. Strange to say, however, the rage 
of bric-a-brac hunting has invaded 
this sleepy citadel : the settlers of old 
German origin are known to possess 
quaint treasures in the way of furni- 
ture, ravishing eight-day clocks pos- 
sibly made by Schwelgue, and del- 
icate services of Dresden : there is 
therefore a mute anxiety and compe- 
tition when vendues of household fur- 
niture are announced ; and we know a 
happy connoisseur who recently had 
the felicity of paying twelve dollars 
for a delicious Dutch clock, and then 
eighty dollars for the "tinkering of 
it up," as the jeweler said. 

But we must not linger too long over 
this old road — a road which, running 
parallel with the Conestoga, has be- 
guiled us into the leisurely mood of 
a Conestoga wagon. It is the merest 



parenthesis for us, only belonging to 
our subject through the pig iron from 
Cornwall which loads its freight - cars. 
We proceed to Harrisburg, where we 
have the satisfaction of seeing the 
legislators of the State presenting their 
boot-soles in semicircular rows to John 
Hancock's chair as they — the soles — 
repose upon the members' desks and 
Hancock's seat reposes in the focus, 
with the Speaker in it. There, leav- 
ing the low gravel-banks, we meet the 
Susquehanna, a river as broad as a 
lake and as flat as a gutter when there 
is not a freshet. The bridge across it 
is so immensely long and so carefully 
enclosed that to cross it is to pass a 
little eternity without sense of advance 
or motion, like walking in the tread- 
mill of a threshing-machine. For this 
privilege you give a nickel to the toll- 
taker and a currency note to the toll- 
taker's child, who thus multiplies the 
family perquisites in the name of 
playfulness, and who from long use 
receives his present quite callously and 
as a matter of business. 

From Harrisburg, by borrowing the 
services of the Northern Central Rail- 
way, we ascend the bank of the Susque- 
hanna so as to attain a point considcra- 




SOCIAL CHAT. 



bly off to the north, and place ourselves 
in the limits of the Catawissa road, fa- 



46 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



mous for its scenery. The transit up the 
Susquehanna is a hne from one point to 
the other of our Y, previously illustrated. 
We pass the mouth of the Juniata, a 
stream wandering down through a coun- 
try rich in iron : opposite this embou- 
chure is Dauphin, one of the river-ports 
to which the Reading Railroad sends out 
a prong. Similar points at the ends of 
similar tines of the fork are Millersburg 
and Herndon, illustrated by us in our 
June number. Then, at Sunbury, the 
Northern Susquehanna branch is cross- 
ed, and we soon gain Milton, a neat, 
fresh-looking town looking out through 
its brilliant windows upon the islands of 
the Susquehanna's West Branch, upon 
which it lies. Milton is most attractive 
in sumrper, the service at Huth's "River- 
side House" is complete and elegant, 
and there can be no doubt that Milton 
as a watering-place will soon rival the 
neighboring attractions of Williamsport, 
now almost overrun with custom. 

At this point we take the Catawissa 
Railroad, a branch controlled by the 
Reading, and step up into the engineer's 
caboose to enjoy that gentleman's com- 
pany and the full magnificence of the 
landscape. Our course now bends east- 
ward. We pass Danville, an iron-man- 
ufacturing town, and Rupert, a junction 
whence, by the Lackawanna road, we 
might reach Wilkesbarre and the Arca- 
dian charms of Wyoming. Then the 
grandeur of the spectacle begins. We 
cross the Susquehanna North Branch, 
and find the town of Catawissa set like a 
punctuation-point to mark the entrance 
of Catawissa Creek. From the hill be- 
hind this old burgh Thomas Moran once 
sketched and painted an enchanting 
scene — the creek, in sight for fifteen 
miles, winding to meet the river through 
ravines embroidered with the dyes of an 
American autumn. The junction of river 
and stream is here a superb scenic nu- 
cleus. Nature, after running the thread of 
a more narrow and continuous landscape 
drama, here suspends the plot and lets 
fall a superb drop-curtain, painted with 
splendor and romance, which detains the 
spectator for a long while in delight and 
with no wish to proceed. She is an art- 



ful stage-manager, and knows well when 
to carry forward her audience, and when 
to give them pause. The bluff below 




MOUTH OF COAL-MINh. 

the town, two hundred feet high, com- 
mands the groves of Catawissa Island, 
the long diorama of the river, the old 
stone-abutted county bridge, the railway 
bridge, the North Branch Canal and the 
banks shaded with verdure. As we reach- 
ed Catawissa on our last visit the train 
was overtaken by a petulant spring storm, 
soon over, but angry, and accompanied 
with the first lightning of the season. 
The clouds darkened the Catawissa ra- 
vine like the approach of night, and the 
rumble of stray thunders accompanied 
the roar of the train reflected from the 
sides of the valley. The mountain-tops, 
hidden in the racing clouds, were con- 
cealed or imperfectly seen, and took on 
from the finishing touches of imagina- 
tion a character absolutely Alpine. The 
stream below, dark-brown in hue, was bor- 
dered on each side with a hard, tense line 
of foam, like the froth on grinning and 
savage lips : we could not hear the roar 
coming up from it, but the report was 
painted, as it were, in its sharp wavelets 
and the quick jets of its spray. The 
enormous pines rocked in the storm, and 
rained from their green eaves into the 
stream — shed over shed of dark ever- 
green branches, roofing the hills to theii 
summits, and from their curved ends 
casting down their tributary streams like 
gutter-spouts. Through this darkness 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



47 



and tempest and solemn privacy of the 
precipices our careless locomotive rattled 
on like an intruder. The curved flight 
around the sides of the hills was doubly 
impressive in such a dimness of the air. 
Everything was crooked and tormented : 
it was always easy to see the rear part 
of our own train bending around behind 
us and apparently chasing us. The very 
tunnels were curved in plan. The lines 
of the rail, bright with wet, glistened like 
the bended figures of geological strata 
as we passed through the cuttings. The 
storm and the confusion for a while in- 
creased, and were perhaps not less im- 
pressive from the presence of the dart- 
ing and twisting train, which described 
among the incessant lightnings the fig- 
ure af a snapping whiplash. At length 
Mainville was reached, and the storm 
rolled away with grotesque suddenness 
to let us see the outlines of Mainville 
Gap. Less grand than Lehigh or Dela- 
ware Gap, that of Mainville still shows 
an enjoyable scene. It gives a highly- 
cultivated valley-view, seen through a 
vase of hills. The scene from the rail- 
road bridge (a very long one), showing 



the McCauley and Nescopeck Mountains 
in the distance, is also very beautiful. 

Between Mainville and Beaver there 
is afforded a very imposing and savage 
view from Stranger's Hollow. It is of a 
profound mountain-gorge, with the dark 
Catawissa seen far below as it lashes, 
chafing, over its rocky channel. This 
scene is especially wild, and the signs of 
man's presence are almost wanting, save 
for the track of the railway coiling and 
clinging in mid -air between the rude 
stream and the shaggy summits of the 
mountains. Approaching the curve at 
Spring Hollow, there is unfolded a double 
valley, formed by a minor chain of hills 
protruding through the valley from Sum- 
mit Tunnel to this spot. It is here that 
the mountains reach their greatest eleva- 
tion ; the road shoots from view to view 
of the noblest hill-scenery ; an unwind- 
ing endless diorama is presented, with 
incessant vistas through the mighty cra- 
dles of the hills, and a giddy pathway 
ever returning upon itself and tracing 
high above the water its aerial orbits for 
the meteor of the railway train. The 
cabins of the farmers, primitive and 
wooden as those of prairie settlers, are seen 
thiough opcnmgs m the pines or through flut- 
♦cimg frames made by the branches of the 
mountam birch Some of the lower hills, com- 
pletely cleared of foiest, have been cultivated 
to the summit, the fences scoring the natural 
protuberance of the knoll, and 
L^^f- __ lookmg, to compare great things 

with small, like the intersections 
in a towering mound of soap- 
bubbles. The wildncss of tlio 




-_Ji — 

FACE OF BREAKER. 



48 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



black 

ness of 

the en 

trance 

the tunnel. In so 

pure and sweet a 



cup 
does Nature give foith 
the water at which pres- 
ently a whole city comes 
and drinks. The load 
now commences to make 
its descent toward com- 
monplace, but does not 
yet begin to lose its sa\- 
age character. Just aftci 
passing this spot, leaving 
the bright and staring 
baldness characteristic of 
mountain - summits, the 
track plunges into the 
dark, counsel -keeping 
shadows of an American 
forest preserved in all its wildness. 
Great bastions of conglomerate rock 
crown the mountain-top, and a litter of 
giant boulders encumbers its base, over 
which the lichens weave their faded 
tapestries. Pines, running more to stem 
than to leaves, and lifting high their 
skeleton arms, watch and whisper over 
all. It is about the last rumor of prim- 
itive vagabondage. In a little time the 
road threads a short tunnel, makes a 
junction at Quakake Valley, winds 
around the side of a huge hill, and then 
presents us at Tamaqua, where the moun- 
tains are dead mountains of black coal- 
dust, environing the whole landscape 
with mourning piles as melancholy as 
the Pyramids. 

By the acquisition of the Catawissa 
road, which was leased in perpetuity two 
years ago, the Reading Railroad justifies 
its claims to be considered one of the 



scene, however, only increases until the mountain-stations 

of Raiicks and Ringtown and Girard are left behind, and 

'II the summit of the pass is reached. Here the Little 

Schuylkill River has its birth, affording a pretty 

vignette. A structure of rough masonry on the 

west side of the road indicates the point where 

the baby river comes bubbling forth from its 

dark matiix m the hills: the waters fall 

over pebbles and gravel among the fern, 

and glance swiftly away to toil over 

their long miles of travel before 

joining the Delaware. Embow- 

eied in deep-green hazel bushes 

and dark pines, the spring 

j- looks sufficiently romantic, 

while a mountain -spur, 

wild with c 1 i f f s and 

rocks, lies off to the 

eastward in clear 

= - illumination. 




contrasting 

with the 

sharp 



COAL SHUTE, DUMl'Ek AND BREAKER. 



most romantic tourist-routes in the coun- 
try, even if the dazzling Schuylkill scenery 
of its stem-portion did not make good 
the title. Our reader now, at the expense 
indeed of a grand detour, has brought 
himself back into the coal-region once 
more. Our old friend Putt's -ville or 
Pottsville is not very far from Tamaqua, 
and is closely allied with it through 
natural seams and artificial interchange 
of coal. We left the carboniferous region 
to pick up iron at Lebanon and view the 
river-sites of Harrisburg, Dauphin, Hern- 
don, Sunbury and Milton : the wild val- 
ley of the Catawissa has guided us round 
again — none the less friendly to a good 
coal-fire for our brief infidelity — to the 
scenes of anthracite, and made a deposit 
of us beside the grand coal-deposit. 

The embodied tropics of the past, saved 
up to create an artificial tropic for the 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



49 




BOYS PICKING OUT SLATE AT ^ 
THE SCREEN. 



present — that is the defini 
tion of coaL No geologist can tell how 
many millenniums it has been preparing. 
One of the cleanest of Nature's products, 
far less mixed in its substance than most 
of the metals, it has been laid by for us 
between smooth leaves of slate rock — 
leaves which thus became a vast natural 
herbarium, filled with ferns which have 
been pressed and dried almost to the 
point of crystallization. The particular 
form of this product which is the boast of 
Pennsylvania is called anthracite from its 
hardness. It is a luxury of the present 
century. Since that day in 1812 when 
the workmen at White and Hazard's 
nail-works at the Falls of Schuylkill left 
their furnaces in a rage because they 
could not make the "black stones" burn, 
and returned to find that during their 
absence they had nearly melted down 
the furnace doors, anthracite coal has 
stood without a rival in the usage of this 
nation. Its introduction to favor was 
difficult. A i&\\ blacksmiths knew the 
stone in the latter part of the eighteenth 
century, and succeeded in igniting it 
under the powerful blast from their bel- 
lows : Obadiah Gore thus used it in 1768 
in the valley of Wyoming, and Whet- 
stone, another smith, employed it in 
Schuylkill county in 1795. On the 
Mauch Chunk Mountain the hunter 
Philip Ginter stubbed his toe against a 
stone of the coal when coming back dis- 
aopointed from a bad day's chase, and 
4 



was afterward cheated of his 
right of discovery. An ark 
filled with the stones was 
sent from that spot in 18 14 
by Charles Miner to Phil- 
adelphia. Just before, a 
Schuylkill man, one Shoe- 
maker, procured a quantity 
of the strange substance 
from a shaft sunk in a tract 
he had bought on the Nor- 
wegian, now known as the 
Centreville Mines. This 
enthusiast, who was a "col- 
onel," loaded nine Cones- 
toga wagons and took them 
himself to Philadelphia 
over the niountain - roads. 
After several days' journey, 
arriving in the capital, he was met as an 
impostor, and obliged to give away most 
of the coal. It was considered good to 
pave the streets with, good to carve into 
pretty inkstands and candlesticks, but it 
was laughed to scorn as fuel until the 
nailers found out how to intensify the 
draught, and parlor grates with blow- 
ers were invented for the citizens. It 
was not until 1821 that the commerce 
of anthracite reached a thousand tons 
per year. Just half a century after that 
it came to exceed fifteen millions of tons 
per year, of which four millions came 
from this Schuylkill region. Anthracite 
for burning is a specialty of America, 
where its cleanly, refined habits, free- 
dom from "blacks," elegant and grace- 
ful style of combustion, and other ad- 
vantages, make it an indispensable lux- 
ury. It is not unknown in Europe, but 
is little employed for family use. Eng- 
lish maltsters and iron-workers bring it 
from the limited deposits in W^ales, Ire- 
land, Staffordshire, Devonshire and near 
Edinburgh. It is found mingled with 
the bituminous fields of France, espe- 
cially in the departments of Isere, the 
High Alps, Gard, Mayenne and Sarth : 
it is also mined in Belgium. As a rule, 
however, this neat quintessence of com 
fort is denied to the society of Europe, 
while it glows in every negro's cabin and 
Irish navvy's hut of this country. 

The best way to indulge in a prowl 



^o 



VIGNETTES FRUAI THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 




JUST ABOVK PORT CLINTON. 



among the mines is to borrow, if possi- 
ble, one of the directors' handsome en- 
gines, employed by the officials of the 
road — the paymasters, mining super- 
intendents, managers, etc. If accident 
directs us to the engine run by Ben the 
Whistler, we shall have the advantage 
of a good-natured, broad-faced compan- 
ion, who was born for a nightingale, but 
ran up into the altitude of a man before 
he meant to : he executes " Down in a 
coal-mine, underneath the ground" and 
other appropriate melodies for ever and 
ever without intermission, and frequently 
whistles in his dreams. Ben's part of 
the engine is hung round with litho- 
graphs of vocal beauties, Nilsson, Patti 
and others, who he thinks would be per- 
fect if they only whistled ; but his finest 



picture is of an Eastern odalisque lying 
on a divan in a suit of unnaturally large 
pearls, and exchanging ideas with her 
most congenial parallel in the natural 
kingdom, a talking parrot. The front 
part of the directors' engine is a hand- 
some room made of plate -glass, with 
Brussels carpet and revolving chairs. 

The engine, if we are on authenti- 
cated terms with head-quarters, will run 
out to meet us at any point. Suppose 
we take it up at Tamaqua. It is the 
privileged character on the road, the 
"captain's gig" among less independent 
craft. Nevertheless, it may not take the 
pas of regular trains, and it will run most 
smoothly if introduced so as just to fol- 
low an express-train : if this cannot be 
done, the engine must "wildcat it," or 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



51 




run on luck, warned off every 
few minutes by established trains, 
shunted on to sidings by burly 
freight lines, bumped by locomo- 
tives advancing from behind, run 
into in tunnels, scared by trains 
advancing around a curve, or 
wrecked and delivered over to the 
embankments by a switch. 

From Tamacjua we may take, 
for the examination of the coal- 
mines, either the straight road to 
Pottsville or a neighboring and 
parallel one called the East Ma- 
hanoy, which leads through the 
next valley to the town of Ash- 
land and its neighborhood. By 
either of these roads we are intro- 
duced to the heart of the mining 
operations, for the sidings coming 
down from the mines branch out 
from either of them as thick as 
briers on a stem, and either of 
them is an avenue laid out in the 
midst of the coal. Close to the 
neat and civilized - looking little 
city of Ashland is the Tunnel 
Mine, a vast excavation necessi- 
tating the most ponderous machi- 
nery and the most approved sys- 
tems of ventilation and hydraul- 
ics. This great shaft is deep and 
almost perpendicular, having an 
inclination of sixty degrees. To 
pump out the water from the mine 
two enormous "bull engines," driv- 
ing plunger pumps, have been set 
up, the cylinders of which en- 
■gines resemble huge artillery mor- 
tars as they lean at an inclination 
of forty-five degrees against their 
supports. The water at the bot- 
tom of this excavation has to be 
brought up nine hundred feet 
vertical lift, which gives the idea 
of a great depth for an American 
mine, though it would be thought 
a trifle in the deep English col- 
lieries. To reach Ashland, how- 
ever, from Tamaqua, we pass a 
number of interesting features on 
the railroad, before any or all of 
which our obedient vehicle will 
take pleasure in stopping. The 



52 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 




STEAM COLLIER. 



East JVIahanoy road, soon after start- 
ing, penetrates a tunnel of thirty-eight 
hundred feet. Frackville and St. Clair 
are mining- towns halfway along to Ash- 
land, filled with characteristic "opera- 
tive" life — stamped all over with the 
peculiar habits and needs of the delving 
population. The engineering of the rail- 
road hereabouts is every way peculiar, 
a heavy grade (one hundred and seventy- 
nine feet to the mile) occurring at Frack- 
ville, and the Mahanoy Inclined Plane 
requiring the services of a steel rope and 
a "barney engine " to draw or lower the 
railway trains. The working of the push- 
er on one of these inclines is somewhat 
similar to the apparatus employed to 
hoist you out of the shaft of a mine, and 
either operation would be best represent- 
ed to the pure cockney mind by the fa- 
miliar elevator of the cockney's favorite 
hotel. The rope on an inclined plane, 
however, travels a great deal nearer level 
than the perpendicular one in a hotel- 
lifter, and the difference is complicated 
by the fact that a stout little engine starts 
out of the gi-ound risrht behind vou at 



the foot of the slope, butts against you 
with its strong forehead, and lifts you in 
triumph to the top of the hill, train, peo- 
ple, freight and all : its mission over, it 
sinks dumlDly into the ground, exit-ing 
like a theatrical ghost. The "barney" 
at Mahanoy Plane carries you a distance 
of twenty-four hundred and ten feet, in 
which distance you have risen a perpen- 
dicular height of three hundred and fifty- 
four feet, and are fourteen hundred and 
seventy-eight feet above tide. 

To explore a shaft is, for the stranger 
properly introduced, a simple and civil 
operation. Guided by the "inside boss" 
or some other functionary, he walks 
through the dark galleries, his feet in 
the wet, his little oil-lamp in his hand, 
staring at everything and not feeling 
very wise. Only when his guide's back 
is turned will the miners show their teeth 
— that is to say, gather round him with 
ferocious pleasantry — and make him 
prisoner until he has paid his "footing," 
or beer-money. The vast mme or col- 
liery just mentioned, the "Tunnel," is a 
fine representative specimen, but others 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



can be found that are not so wet and 
where the walking is better. After all, 
the impression is a vague one, and the 
amateur, as he explores the galleries, 



iiffi 




feels that he is probably not looking par- 
ticularly philosophical. Strangers who 
have friends or influence inside the mines 
sometimes go into a great number, mak- 



ing it a point to seize the pick and per- 
sonally quarry out a specimen of coal 
from each slope they enter : it is a hun- 
dred to one but they select a bit of slate, 
which, blackened and 
irregular, cannot be dis- 
tinguished by an unpro 
fessional. The lights in 
the hats of the miners 
twinkle like stars in little 
groups, forming, as the 
men work together in the 
various benches, tempo- 
rary Ursa Majors and 
Orions against the black- 
ness. The puddles and 
trams at your feet are all 
that your feeble light 
gives you to see. You 
march on and on, fol- 
lowing the guide, with- 
out much sense of mo- 
tion. Losing your idea 
of place, you imagine 
you are again wandering 
through the Catacombs 
of St. Calixtus at Rome, 
where the dust of Chris- 
tian martyrs floats in the 
air, and where you fol- 
low the cicerone with 
marvelous meekness, 
knowing that to desert 
him would be slow star- 
vation and death. 

Suddenly comes a 
booming sound which 
never was heard in the 
cemetery of- St. Calixtus. 
They have started a 
blast : the fume of gun- 
powder fills the air, and 
the galleries are sudden- 
ly made to seem more 
infinitely long as this 
smoke, reflecting the 
lights like a vapor, gives 
an idea of space or ex- 
tent. Then the look of 
things is like that of a 
Russian bath, only a blacker one than 
ordinary. It is an unbounded space of 
mist, through which are moving human 
silhouettes with outlines of yellow light. 



54 



VIGNETTES FROM THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY. 



You are warned by the guide of a pos- 
sible collision : a mule and a car of coals, 
or a mule and a dozen empty coal-cars, 
are advancing upon you either out or in. 
Gay little blackened boys, with 
songs and jests, drive them. The 
mule coming out with his tribute 
of large coals marches straight to 
the "breaker." This is the tall, 
well -blackened wooden monu- 
ment seen by travelers at Mauch 
Chunk and all places of resort 
among the coal-mines. It is a 
simple thing in theory, but to 
climb over its giddy machinery, 
with a high gale blowing through 
its elevated and open spaces, the 
footing slippery and lubricated 
with sliding coal-dust, and the 
din of machinery confusing ev- 
erything, is not a very simple 
thing in practice. The coal, de- 
livered at the top of the building, 
is shot into a wonderful hopper, 
armed at the bottom with the 
grinding teeth of two frightful 
wheels, which inter-revolve, and 
are set thick with fangs a hun- 
dred times worse than ever tor- 
tured Saint Catherine. The great 
lumps are broken by these into 
bits of all sizes, and then fall 
through a series of squirrel-cages, 
as we may call them. The re- 
volving cages are the screens, 
which are placed at a great 
height for the proper direction 
of the next operation, and thus 
necessitate the extreme loftiness 
of the buildings. The coal rolls 
from coarser to finer squirrel - 
cages, from between whose wires 
it slips down over inclined floors, 
upon which sit boys and old men 
picking out the slate. The seve- 
ral operations are all movements 
of natural gravitation, and to- 
gether make needful buildings of 
enormous height (and painful 
flimsiness). 

It is then immediately taken up by the 
Reading Railroad in its capacity of coal- 
merchant and loaded into cars, to collect 
in a gre^ct bulk at Pottsville or its suburb. 



Mount Carbon, to meet the forks of the 
Schuylkills at Port Clinton, and thence 
accompany the Schuylkill proper to Phila- 
delphia, which it enters \>y crossing the 




picturesque old bridge at the "Falls," 
and makes its way over the northern 
part of the city to the company's im- 
mense Richmond wharves, known as 



FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BALTIMORE 



55 



" Port Richmond." Here it is distributed 
by rail to any part of America or loaded 
into the company's fleet of steam colliers ; 
in which the commodity of coal, a rustic 
and a dweller in the interior for some 
millions of years, is taught, amidst the 
confusion of a rolling keel and a pitching 



hold, to prove how good a sailor it can 
be. The uses of coal in our industries, 
as evidenced in enormous iron - works 
like those we picture — the two largest 
rolling-mills in the country — are infinite, 
but we have talked too long, and must 
perforce dismiss the theme. 



FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BALTIMORE. 




VIEW OK THE SCHUYLKILL RIVER AND WEST PHILADELPHIA. 



IN 1832 a few adventurous men ob- 
tained a charter for a railroad from 
Baltimore to Port Deposit : other char- 
ters were granted by Delaware and 
Pennsylvania in succeeding years, and 
at last in 1838 all were consolidated as 
the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Bal- 
timore Railroad Company, and became 
a through all-rail line, interrupted only 
by the Susquehanna and some minor 
water-courses, under one management, 
beginning at Philadelphia and ending at 
Baltimore. It struggled along, making 
but little progress up to 185 1, when Mr. 
Samuel M. Felton was brought from 
Boston to assume the presidency. 

Seeing the actual and future import- 



ance of the line, some Eastern men 
bought up the stock, put in the neces- 
sary money and encouraged Mr. Felton 
to begin an entire revolution in the road. 
The road-bed was perfected and widen- 
ed for a double track, new depots erect- 
ed in Baltimore and Philadelphia, new 
rails laid, and new branches opened. 

When the war broke out in 1862 this 
road was the key of the continent. 
Since then enormous improvements 
have been made, thousands of steel 
rails have been laid, locomotives and 
freight and passenger cars have been 
added to the stock, new depots made, 
a new line planned and executed, 
carrying the road from the broad 



56 



FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BALTIMORE. 



meadows and marshes of the Delaware 
through the valleys and beautiful roll- 
ing uplands of Delaware county to Ches- 



ter, avoiding all danger from floods, and 
going over or under twenty-seven streets 
to enter the city without possible peril to 




hllAKON HILL. 



life or limb. A whole railroad system 
subsidiary to this road has been devel- 
oped in Delaware, and to-day, with the 
best road-bed, double tracks, steel rails, 
the best locomotives, the best passenger 




cars in the country, supplied with all the 
modern improvements of brake, platform 
and signal, and a perfectly drilled corps 
of subordinates, this road may chal- 
lenge the attention of the country, and 
be pointed out as one of the best evi- 
dences of the growth and prosperity of 
Philadelphia. 

The depot in Philadelphia, at the 
corner of Broad street and Washington 
avenue, is a large and spacious build- 
ing, which does not pretend to be a 
model of domestic architecture, but is 
roomy and reasonably well ventilated. 
The bell rings, we take our seats and 
move out through the usual coal-yards 
and shanties and suburbs, passing the 
United States Arsenal, until we reach 
Gray's Ferry, where we see the Schuyl- 
kill, beautiful at high tide, the high 
banks opposite once a famous estate, 
now the seat of the Almshouse, where 
four thousand paupers live in the win- 
ter and about fifteen hundred in the 
summer. So mild and pleasant is this 
climate that the majority of the paupers 
creep out, like the blue bottleflies, with 
the coming of spring, preferring to sleep 
in barns or under the green trees all the 
summer, rather than endure the hard beds, discipline and 
regular habits of the Almshouse. The rains of summer may 
fill their old bones with rheumatism for winter, but there are 



GLENOLDEN. 



FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BALTIMORE. 



57 




RIDLEY PARK. 



charms in the Hfe of the stroller, who 
feeds to-day at a farm-house, or works 
a few hours to-morrow for a trifle to get 
whisky and tobacco, but has no. notes to 
pay, no house to maintain, no servants 
to support. 

Gray's Ferry is an old historic name, 
for here Washington and the men 
of the Revolution crossed again 
and again. The old rope ferry 
was succeeded by the old horse 
ferry, and now there are three rail- 
roads here — the Darby Improve- 
ment, the Junction (which goes to 
West Philadelphia and makes the 
connection for the great Southern 
Air-line), and the old hne, which 
leads us out, through the old Bart- 
ram Gardens, where an enthusias- 
tic botanist made the first and best 
collection of trees and plants in 
this country, on to the marshes of 
the Delaware. The mighty river, 
widening into a bay, flows on to 
the ocean, its bosom furrowed by 
thousands of keels and whitened 
by myriad sails. We look over wide acies of 
marshes, now green with the tender colois of spiing, 
the corn-fields of the higher portion giving by their 
brown earth beautiful contrasts of color, the lows 
of corn just coming into sight. All over these 
meadows stand huge oak trees and elms, amongst 
whose branches the vessels seem to glide. But 
beautiful as the scene is, it is a bad place for a rail- 
road, for when the great river rushes down swollen 
by some freshet, and is met by the incoming tide. 



the water sets back over 
the marshes and threat- 
ens to sweep away the 
track or put out the fires 
of the locomotives; 
and to cross streams and 
tideways many draw- 
bridges, with their at- 
tendant dangers, must 
be m ai n t ained. To 
avoid all these difficul- 
ties, Mr. Hinckley plan- 
ned the change which 
is known as the Darby 
Improvement, carrying 
the road from Gray's 
Ferry to Chester over 
and through the high 
lands of Darby and Ridley. We shall 
no longer hear the brakeman shout out 
"Gibson's," "Lazaretto," "Tinicum" 
(called by the Indians Tenecitnck), 
"Crum Creek." We shall no longer 
wonder that the train should be stopped 
for so few passengers to get on or off, 




CKUM LYNNE FALLS. 



58 



FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BALTIMORE. 



for in future our car will take us over a 
road-bed so perfectly laid with steel rails 
that a full glass of water will not spill as 
the train hurries on through a thickly 
settled country. Look quickly from the 



window at the country you are travers- 
ing : see the beautiful station at Bon- 
naffon, and the magnificent oak tree, 
worth a hundred stations, that stands in 
a field iust beyond. We cannot enu- 




lJlbl\M VUW OI LANDbCAl'h, bHUWINC MIIlfAkY liNslUUlE Al CHLSltR. 



merate all the beauties and objects of 
interest that line the road : every valley 
opens a pleasant view, every hill is cov- 
ered with handsome houses, comfortable 
farmeries or superb trees. Before the 
road was made, these lands, lying on 
a ridge high above the river, perfectly 
healthy and offering the most desirable 
homes for city people, were inaccessible, 
but now they can be reached, and have 
been already appreciated. Most of the 
land has grown too valuable for farming, 
and has been bought up and laid out 
with different degrees of care for sub- 
urban residences. 

Darby is one of the oldest towns in 
the State, and contributes largely to the 
business of the road. Mills were built 
here in 1696, and it was divided into Up- 
per and Lower Darby in 1786. The first 



of the new towns is Sharon Hill, where 
a large amount of land has been laid 
out in the rectangular method, and al- 
ready many of the lots are sold to actual 
settlers : a machine shop has been es- 
tablished, and the railroad has built a 
very nice station for passengers. 

Next to Sharon Hill comes Glenoldcn, 
where hill and dale, wood and mead- 
ow and a beautiful stream, offer all the 
picturesqueness that can charm an en- 
thusiastic or artistic eye, together with 
good building-sites and every advantage 
that fertile and forest-clad land can give 
to one who would exchange the heat and 
pavements of a city for rural life. From 
Glenolden it is but a short distance to 
Norwood and to Moore's Crossing, where 
the company are erecting turnouts, en- 
gine-houses, etc., and from here, eight 



FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BALTIMORE. 



59 



miles from the city, numerous trains will 
run to Philadelphia to accommodate the 
workingmen who, it is beheved, will 
come out to live on these cool and breezy 
uplands. 



From Moore's we soon get to Ridley 
Park, which was described at length in 
a former Number. The two stations at 
Ridley are models of beauty in their 
way : the principal station spans the 




Ku/hR bl.MI.NAKV, 



road-bed, wide enough here for four 
tracks, and is probably the most pictu- 
resque in the country, as well as very 
convenient. Crum Lynne Station is re- 
markable for the beautiful sculpture of 
the capitals of the pilasters to the archi- 
traves of the windows, the architect hav- 
ing designed each one for this build- 
ing, using the flowers and fruits and 
birds and animals of the region for his 
ornamental work, instead of the usual 
cornice and frieze and capital of Grecian 
architecture. 

But the train sweeps us away from 
Ridley limits, past Leiperville with its 
primeval railway, and on to Chester. 
As we round the curve and rush through 
the woods we see on the left the broad 
river with its three-masted schooners, 
ships and steamers, and on the right the 



spires and houses of the town ; and first 
and predominant the Military School of 
Colonel Hyatt. This school was incor- 
porated by act of Legislature in 1862, 
and is devoted to both civil and military 
education. The studies and drill are so 
combined as to secure good mental and 
physical culture; and to ensure good 
military instruction the State and the. 
United States have contributed arms of 
all kinds. Scholars come from all parts 
of the country, and even the West In- 
dies ; and as the standard of scholarship 
is high, the graduates compare favorably 
with those from other institutions. 

Chester is one of the oldest towns on 
the line of the road by actual years, but 
one of the youngest in growth. First 
called by the Indians Mackaponacka, 
and then by the settlers Upland, it had 



6o 



FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BALTIMORE. 




a justice of the peace court in 1676. Its 
court-house was built in 1724. Its first news- 
paper was published in 1819. For many 
years Chester dozed away in dignified quiet 
as the county-town : its court-house and jail 
gave it all the honor it required. But the 
streams made good mill-sites, the deep water- 
front along the river offered splendid wharf- 
age and chances for shipbuilding, and, as 
good luck Avould have it, a rivalry awoke 
which ended in loading Media with the coun- 
ty buildings and relieving Chester. Since 
then it has doubled and trebled : mills and 
factories are on all sides, and its shipyards. j 
are not easily surpassed. Roach's shipyard * 
covers twenty-three acres. The firm make 
their own engines and everything required in . 
iron shipbuilding from keel to topmast. They \ 
have six vessels now on the stocks, and em- 
ploy eleven hundred men, and have room 
for sixteen hundred. They have built for 
every trade from the coaster to the East In- 
diaman, varying in size from six hundred to 
four thousand tons, and their vessels pass un- 
challenged amongst the best in the world. 

Nor is trade the only feature of the town. 
About half a mile from the depot, on a gen- 
tle eminence, is the Crozer Theological Semi- 
nary. The approach from Chester for the pe- 
destrian, along the shrub-, vine- and tree-clad 
banks of Chester Creek into and across the 
wide lawn, is a delightful walk. The princi- 
pal building was erected by John P. Crozer 
for a normal school. During the war he 
gave it to the government for a hospital, and 
when he died in 1866 left it to his sons, de- 
sirmg them to devote it to some benevolent 
use. They have responded in a munificent 
manner by establishing a school for training 
young men for the ministry, with accommo- 
dations for a hundred students, houses for the 
professors, a church, a library building, lec- 
ture-halls and all the required conveniences 
for a great and successful school. They 
have added an endowment fund of two hun- 
dred and twenty-eight thousand dollars, the 
whole gift being about three hundred and 
ninety thousand dollars, and one of the fam- 
ily has since given twenty-five thousand dol- 
lars as a library fund. The seminary was 
opened in 1868 with fifteen students: there 
are now fifty from all parts of the Union. 

But the most complaisant conductor of the 
most accommodating special train could not 



FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BALTIMORE. 



6i 




^1 >11 1 Ni. 1 1 Ml 1 O C U\K1 l\ 

wait any longer for us, and we must hurry on through Lamokin, where the 
Baltimore Central, a tributary road, turns off and traverses a most picturesque 
country, round by Port De- 
posit to Perryville, where 
it again reaches the main 
road. At Lamokin are 
works where steel of a pe- 
culiar kind is manufac- 
tured under a European 
patent. From here the 
road again clings to the 
shore of the Delaware, and 
until we reach Wilming- 
ton the river, with its sails 
and its blue water, is on 
the left — on the right a 
high ridge, which ends in 
the valley of the Shell Pot 
and Brandywine at Wil 
mington. 

We flash past Linwood 
to stop a moment at Clay- 
mont, where the ridge 
comes nearer the river and 
offers superb sites for 
buildings. Why Clay- 
mont has not grown more 
no one seems to know. 
There are schools and 
churches, fine rolling land, 

noble river-views, and all ^ '^^iTSMB^MUBlff"^" ' ^ ^ ^1'^^^^- 

that can make a country "view ok 1)EL.\w.\ke river near cl-Wmont. 




62 



FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BALTIMORE. 




VIEW AT CLAYMONI CREFK AM) BRIDGE. 



home delightful. That the place has 
attractions for lovers of the picturesque 
may be inferred from the fact that it 
counts among its residents an artist of 
such wide and well-founded celebrity as 



Mr. F. O. C. Darley, whose delineations 
of American life and scenery, especially 
in the form of book-illustrations, have 
been familiar to the public for the past 
thirty years. With so many years of 




fame, Mr. Darley counts but fifty-two of life, and in the 
enjoyment of vigorous health still continues the practice 
of his art, executing many commissions from Europe, 
where his genius is as highly appreciated as at home. 



FROM PHILADELl'HIA TO BALTIMORE. 



63 



But we must stick to our train, which car- 
ries us through the Red Bank Cut to Ellers- 
he Station, where occurred the first accident 
of a serious character which has happened 
on this road for eighteen years, and which 
was due only to a willful violation of orders 
by an old and very trusted conductor. At 
EUerslie are the Edgemoor Iron-works of 
Messrs. William Sellers &; Co., where every 
known improvement in the manufacture of 
iron is being tested and applied. The next 
curve in the road shows us the meadows of 
the Shell Pot and the Brandywine, with 
Wilmington in the distance. The Brandy- 
wine, famous in our history, runs through 
as picturesque a valley as there is in Amer- 
ica, combining all that the climate of Del- 
aware permits in trees, shrubs, vines and 
flowers with the wildness and variety of the 
valley of the Pemigewasset or the wild Am- 
monoosuck. In this rare valley are mills as 
old as the settlement of the country, and 
quaint hamlets that seem to belong to Eu- 
rope rather than America. 

At Wilmington the system of the Dela- 
ware railroads begins : it spreads out over 
the peninsula of Delaware and the Eastern 
Shore of Maryland like a huge left hand. 
The thumb touches Chestertown and Centre- 
ville, the fore finger Oxford, the middle fin- 
ger Cambridge, the ring finger Crisfield, the 
little finger Lewes ; and this hand gathers 
into the main road every year millions of 
baskets of peaches, and millions more of 
oysters in baskets and sacks, and crates of 
berries, and car-loads of hardwood and lum- 
ber. Under the influence of these roads the 
sleepy peninsula is beginning a new career. 

We cannot go down the peninsula, so let 
us keep on to Baltimore, pausing, however, 
for a moment as we cross Mason and Dix- 
on's line near Elkton. Little did Charles 
Mason and Jeremiah Dixon dream, as they 
set that tangent point for the determination 
of the boundary-lines of the three States, 
how famous they would become. But there 
the simple monument stands in the open 
fields, and there it must remain so long as 
the three States need a boundary. 

Soon after leaving Mason and Dixon we 
strike the first of the great estuaries of the 
Delaware and Susquehanna, which are the 
delight of the sportsman, the naturalist and 
the tourist. No matter at what season of 




64 



FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BALTIMORE. 



the year you approach North-east, Prin- 
cipio, the Susquehanna River or Stem- 
rner's Run — no matter at what time of the 
day — the views are always fine. The 
water spreads out in huge widening bays, 
and loses itself in the forest or hides 




MOUNr ARARAT — i-ROFlLE ROCK. 

behind some projecting headland ; and 
when, as is often the case, the surface 
of the water is actually darkened with 
large flocks of wild- fowl, the variety as 
well as beauty of the scene could not be 
heightened. Such shooting-ground for 
sportsmen exists nowhere else on this 
coast easily accessible. At Perryville, 
Havre de Grace, Bush River and many 
other places the chance sportsman can 
find every accommodation, while clubs 
of gentlemen have leased manv of the 



best points, and established little houses 
where they may be comfortable when 
the day's sport is over, and where they 
can leave from season to season boats, 
decoys and all the paraphernalia of the 
sport. To recount the names of can- 
vas-backs, red heads, bald 
pates and innumerable 
other ducks, to tell of the 
tens, fifties, hundreds shot 
in a single day, would add 
nothing to the excitement 
of any sportsman who has 
seen from the cars the huge 
flocks of birds rise and 
sweep out to sea when 
scared by some passing 
train or boat. 

If every passenger could 
stop once, and study the 
Susquehanna bridge cross- 
ing the river between Per- 
ryville and Havre de 
Grace, he would have a 
most profound respect for 
its projectors and builders. 
For many years all trans- 
port by cars was interrupt- 
ed here, and travelers and 
merchandise were trans 
ported by ferry-boat, caus- 
ing wearisome delays and 
extra expense. But now a 
bridge 3273 feet long and 
with loco feet of trestling, 
resting on thirteen huge 
piers built on foundations 
in water from twenty-seven 
to sixty feet deep, and cost- 
ing a miUion and a half 
of dollars, carries all safe- 
ly over, and defies floods 
and ice. This bridge, one of the tri- 
umphs of engineering and a just source 
of pride to the road, has already saved 
in time and trouble a large percentage 
of its cost. It was threatened the past 
winter by the ice-pack which filled the 
river back to Port Deposit, and which 
seemed to promise for some time the de- 
struction of that well-named little town. 
It is hard to believe that in a country so 
extensive as ours, with all kinds of lands 
and town-sites, any one could begin to 



FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BAL TIMORE. 



65 




PORT DtPOSIl. 



build a town in such a situation. It 
clings to the broken and rocky shores 
and hillsides as lichens adhere to rocks 
and to the bark of trees or swallows' 
nests to the eaves of a barn. There it 
is, however, and, judging from its costly 



houses, churches and business appear- 
ance, its inhabitants have found it a 
profitable place to stay in. Port Deposit 
last winter, when the river was filled with 
ice from shore to shore and for miles in 
both directions, fissured and cracked 




I '^3 




1 >_)lv 1 Mclll.NRV. 



and covered with mud, logs and debris, seemed on the 
verge of destruction ; and it was easy to believe that if 
the river did rise suddenly the moving mass of ice, like 
some huge glacier, would sweep away all evidences of 
humanity, leaving behind only the glacial scratches 
and the roches vwuto7xnecs. Overhanging the railroad 



66 



FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BALTIMORE. 



is a very remarkable profile rock which 
has attained some celebrity, and is shown 
in one of our sketches. 

From Port Deposit to Baltimore the 
country is more rolling than from Perry- 
ville to Wilmington, and there are many 




THE J!RIlIt>H SHtLL. 



picturesque points. One could find at 
Gunpowder River and Stemmer's Run 
several beautiful points of view, but by 
the time he reaches these places the 
traveler begins to get impatient for the 
great city, the terminus of his wander- 
ings, which soon begins to announce it- 
self by more thickly congregated houses, 
and roads cut straight through hill and 
valley, regardless of cost or the destruc- 
tion of local charms of hill and dale. 

If one were to judge by the streets, he 
would think Baltimorians lived only on 



oysters, for the new streets seem wholly 
built of their shells, making them very 
white, glaring and offensive to the un- 
accustomed eye. But the attention is 
soon diverted from houses and roads 
to the bay and to Fort McHenry, which 
lies before the town like a sleeping lion. 
Few forts in the country are more inter- 
esting or have played a more important 
part in our military history ; but all its 
military reputation is less interesting 
than the fact that whilst confined to a 
British vessel, one of the fleet unsuccess- 
fully bombarding the fort, Francis Key 
wrote the "Star-Spangled Banner," now 
a national hymn. A bomb thrown into 
the fort at that time by the British has 
been preserved on a pillar ever since— 
almost the only local reminder of the 
facts of the bombardment. 

At Baltimore we leave the Philadel- 
phia, Wilmington and Baltimore Rail- 
road, sorry to part from so good a road 
and one so important to the welfare of 
the country. It is a link in the great 
system, and one kept very bright and 
well pohshed by its managers. Their 
course has been to pay only a mod- 
erate dividend, and use the rest of the 
earnings to improve the road and its be- 
longings, and to foster the interests of 
the people who use it. Such wise pol- 
icy must build it strongly into the affec- 
tions and interests of those who live 
along it, and ensure its being each year 
a better and better-paying road- 




FROM THE POTOMAC TO THE OHIO. 




VIEW NEAR ANTIETAM, MARYLAND. 



AN old writer who dearly loved ex- 
cursions, Francis Rabelais, insert- 
ed in one of his fables an account of a 
country where the roads were in motion. 
He called the place the Island of Odes, 
from the Greek odaq, a "road," and ex- 
plained : " For the roads travel, like ani- 
mated things ; and some are wandering 
roads, like planets, others passing roads, 
crossing roads, connecting roads. And 
I saw how the travelers, messengers and 
inhabitants of the land asked. Where 
does this road go to ? and that ? They 
were answered, From the south to Fa- 
veroUes, to the parish, to the city, to the 
river. Then hoisting themselves on the 
proper road, without being otherwise 
troubled or fatigued, they found them- 
selves at their place of destination." 

This fancy sketch, thrown off by an 
inveterate joker three hundred years 
ago, is justified curiously by any of our 
modern railways ; but to see the picture 



represented in startling accuracy you 
should find some busy "junction " among 
the coal-mountains. Here you may ob- 
serve, from your perch upon the hill, an 
assemblage of roads actively reticulating 
and radiating, winding through the val- 
leys, slinking off misanthropically into 
a tunnel, or gayly parading away el- 
bow-in-elbow with the streams. These 
avenues, upon minute inspection, are 
seen to be obviously moving: they are 
crawling and creeping with an unbroken 
joint-work of black wagons, the rails 
hidden by their moving pavement, and 
the road throughout advancing, foot by 
foot, into the distance. It is hardly too 
fanciful — on seeing its covering slide 
away, its switches swinging, its turn- 
tables revolving, its drawbridges open- 
ing — to declare that such a road is an 
animal — an animal proving its nature, 
according to Aristotle, by the power to 
move itself. Nor is it at all censurable 

6/ 



68 



FROM THE POTOMAC TO THE OHIO 



to ask of a road like this where it "goes 
to." 

The notion of what Rabelais calls a 
"wayfaring way," a chcmin ckeinhtant, 
came into our thoughts at Cuinberland. 
But Cumberland was not reached until 
after many miles of interesting travel 
along a route remarkable for beauties, 
both natural and improved. A coal- 
distributor is certain, in fact, to be a road 
full of attractions for the tourist ; for 
coal, that Sleeping Beauty of our era, 
always chooses a pretty bed in which to 
perform its slumber of ages. The road 
which delivers the Cumberland coal, 
however, is truly exceptional for splen- 
dor of scenery, as well as for historical 
suggestiveness and engineering science. 
It has recently become, by means of cer- 
tain lavish providences established for 
the blessing of travelers at every turn, a 
tourist route and a holiday delight. 

It is all very well for the traveler of 
the nineteenth century to protest against 
the artificial and unromantic guidance of 
the railway : he will find, after a little 
experience, that the homes of true ro- 
mance are discovered for him by the 
locomotive ; that solitudes and recesses 
which he would never find after years 
of plodding in sandal shoon are silently 
opened to him by the engineer ; and 
that Timon now, seeking the profound- 
est cave in the fissures of the earth, 
reaches it in a Pullman car. 

The silvery Capitoline dome at Wash- 
ington floats up from among its garden 
trees, seeming to grow higher and higher 
as we recede from it. Quickly domina- 
ting the low and mean buildings which 
encumber and try to hide it in its own 
neighborhood, it gradually rises superior 
to the whole city, growing greater as 
Washington grows less. The first part 
of the course is over the loop of road 
newly acquired and still improving by 
the company — a loop hanging down- 
ward from Baltimore, so as to sweep 
over Washington, and confer upon the 
through traveler the gift of an excursion 
through the capital. This loop swings 
southwardly from Baltimore to a point 
near Frederick, Washington being set 
upon it like a bead in the midst. The 



older road, like a mathematical chord, 
stretches still between the first points, 
but is occupied with the carrying of 
freight. The tourist notices the stout 
beams of the bridges, the new look of 
the sleepers, and the sheen of the dou- 
ble lines of fresh steel rail : he observes 
some heavy mason-work at the Monoc- 
acy River. Two hours have passed : at 
Frederick Junction he joins a road whose 
cuttings are grass-grown, whose quarried 
rocks are softened with lichen. He is 
struck by the change, and with reason, 
for he is now being carried under the 
privileges of the first railroad charter 
granted in America. 

We may not here undertake the story 
of the iron track, though it is from this 
very road that such a story must take its 
departure, and though we cannot grant 
that that story would be exceeded by any 
in the range of the author's skill as a 
matter of popular interest. This rail- 
road, this " Baltimore and Ohio " artery, 
connects, through its origin, with the very 
beginnings of modern progress, and in- 
deed with feudalism ; for it was opened 
in 1828 by Charles Carroll, the patriot 
who had staked his broad lands of Car- 
rollton in 1776 against the maintenance 
of feudalism in this country. "I con- 
sider this," said Carroll, after his slender 
and aristocratic hand had relinquished 
the spade, "among the most important 
acts of my life — second only to my sign- 
ing the Declaration of Independence." 
Railroads, excepting coal - mine trams, 
were as yet untried ; Stephenson had not 
yet exhibited the Rocket; for travel and 
transportation the locomotive was un- 
known, and the Baltimoreans conceived 
their scheme while yet uncertain whether 
horse-power or stationary steam-engines 
would be the best acting force. It was 
opened as far as Ellicott's Mills as a 
horse-road, the idlers and beauties of 
Baltimore participating in the excursion 
as a novel jest. In 1830, Baron Kru- 
dener, the envoy from Russia, rode upon 
it in a car with sails, called the yEolus, 
a model of which he sent to the emperor 
Nicholas as something new and hopeful. 

Passing the Monocacy, we roll over a 
rich champaign country, based upon 



FROM THE POTOMAC TO THE OHIO. 



69 



limestone — the garden of the State, and 
containing the ancient manor of Carroll- 
ton, through whose grounds, by one of 
its branches, this road passes for miles. 
Near by are quarries of Breccia marble — 
a conglomerate of cemented variegated 
pebbles — out of which were cut the rich 
pillars in the House of Representatives 
at Washington. The Monocacy is cross- 
ed, near whose bank lies the bucolic old 
Maryland town of Frederick, to attain 
which a twig of the road wanders off 
for the few necessary miles. Soon the 
piquant charms of Potomac scenery are 



at hand, the mountains are marching 
upon us, and the road becomes stimu- 
lating. 

A jagged spur of the Blue Ridge, the 
Catoctin Mountain, strides out to the 
river, and the railroad, striking it, wraps 
itself around the promontory in a sharp 
curve, like a blow with the flat of an 
elastic Damascus sword. The broad 
Potomac sweeps rushing around its 
base : it is the celebrated Point of Rocks. 
The nodding precipice, cut into a rough 
and tortured profile by the engineers, 
lays its shadow to sleep on the whizzing 




PO'rOM.\C TUNNEL, NEAR HARPER'S FERRV. 



roofs of the cars as they glitter by. (Shad- 
ows always seem to print themselves with 
additional distinctness upon any moving 
object, like a waterfall or a foaming 
stream.) There are a village and a 
bridge at the Point, and the mountain- 
range, broken in two by the riv-er, re- 
covers itself gracefully and loftily on the 
other side. 

For half an hour more, as we rush to 
meet the course of the Potomac, the 
broad ledges that heave the bed of the 
river into mounds, and the ascending 
configuration of the shore, seem to speak 
of something grand, and directly we are 



in the cradle of romance, at Harper's 
Ferry. 

To reach this village, perhaps the most 
picturesque in the country, we must cross 
the Potomac from Maryland into Vir- 
ginia. The bridge is peculiar and artis- 
tic. It is about nine hundred feet long ; 
its two ends are curved in opposite di- 
rections, and at its farther extremity it 
splits curiously into two bridge-branches, 
one of which supports the road running 
up the Shenandoah, while the other car- 
ries the main road along the Potomac. 
The latter fork of the bridge runs for 
half a mile up the course of the Potomac 



7° 



FROM THE POTOMAC TO THE OHIO. 



stream over the water, the road having 
been denied footing upon the shore on 
account of the presence there of the 
government arsenal buildings. The 
effect to the eye is very curious : the ar- 
senal is at present razed to the level of 
the ground (having been fired, the read- 
er will remember, by the Federal guard 
at the beginning of hostilities, and some 
fifteen thousand stand of arms burnt to 
prevent their falling into Lee's hands), 
and there is no topographical reason to 
prevent the track running comfortably 
on dry ground. The arrangements, how- 
ever, for purchasing the right to a road- 
bed on the arsenal grounds, though un- 



der way, are not yet complete, and the 
road marches on aquatically, as afore- 
said. 

Harper's Ferry, a town supported of 
old almost entirely by the arsenal works, 
is a desolate little stronghold among 
towering mountains, the ruins being in 
the foreground. The precipices on either 
side of the river belong to the Elk Ridge, 
through which, at some antediluvian pe- 
riod, the colossal current has hewed its 
way. At the base of the Virginia side of 
the mountains, hugged in by the Poto- 
mac and Shenandoah Rivers, and by 
Loudon and Bolivar Heights, cowers the 
town. Across the river towers the mighty 




BATTLE-GROUNDS OF THE POTOMAC VALLEY. 



cupola of Maryland Height, far overtop- 
ping the other peaks, and farther down 
the stream, like a diminishing reflection 
of it, the softer swell of South Mountain. 
An ordinary rifle-cannon on Maryland 
Height can with the greatest ease play at 
bowls to the other summits. From this 
eminence one Colonel Ford, on Septem- 
ber 13, 1 862, toppled down his spiked and 
coward cannon : the hostile guns of the 
enemy quickly swarmed up the summit 
he had abandoned, and the Virginia 
crests of Loudon and Bolivar belched 
with rebel artillery. The town was sur- 
rendered by Colonel Miles at the very 
moment when McClellan, pressing for- 



ward through the passes of South Moun- 
tain from Frederick, was at hand to 
relieve it : Miles was killed, and the con- 
siderable military stores left in the vil- 
lage were bagged by Stonewall Jackson. 
Flushed with this temporary advantage, 
Jackson proceeded to join Lee, who then 
advanced from Sharpsburg and gave un- 
successful battle to the Union forces at 
Antietam Creek. 

This stream pours into the Potomac 
just above, from the Maryland side. It 
gives its name to one of the most inter- 
esting actions of the war. The fields of 
Antietam and Gettysburg were the only 
two great battle-grounds on which the 



FROM THE POTOMAC TO THE OHIO. 



Confederates played the role of inva- 
ders and left the protection of their na- 
tive States. Antietam was the first, and 
if it could have been made for Lee a 
more decisive failure, might have pre- 
vented Gettysburg. It occurred Sep- 
tember 15th to 1 8th, 1862. Lee had 
just thoroughly whipped that handsome 
Western braggart, General Pope, and, 
elated with success, thought he could 
assume the offensive, cross the Potomac, 
and collect around his banner great 
armies of dissatisfied secessionists to 
the tune of "Maryland, my Maryland." 
McClellan (then in the last month of his 
command over the army of the Poto- 
mac) pushed with unwonted vigor over 
the mountains, inspired, it is said, by the 
accidental foreknowledge of Lee's whole 
Maryland plan, and clashed with Lee 
across the bridges of this pretty highland 
stream. As an episode he lost Harper's 
Ferry ; but that was a trifle. It was a 
murderous duel, that which raged around 
the Dunker church and over the road 
leading from Sharpsburg to Hagerstown. 
Lee's forty thousand men were shielded 
by an elbow of the Potomac ; his bat- 
teries of horse-artillery under Stuart were 
murdering the forces of Hooker, when 
that general was relieved by the support 
of Mansfield; then Mansfield was killed 
and Hooker wounded ; and then Sedg- 
wick was sent up to replace Mansfield ; 
then, when Sedgwick was getting the 
better of Jackson and Hood, McLaws 
and Walker drew up to the Confederate 
left, and burst completely through Sedg- 
wick's line. Presently, Franklin and 
Smith came across from the stream 
and reinforced the Federals, driving the 
Southern advance back to the church, 
and Burnside rendered some hesitating 
assistance ; but then rushed up the force 
which had received the surrender of 
Harper's Ferry, singing victory, and 
drove back Burnside ; and when Mc- 
Clellan, on the morning of the 19th, 
found that Lee had withdrawn across 
the Potomac, he was too much discour- 
aged with his own hurts to venture a pur- 
suit. He had lost twelve thousand men, 
and Lee eight thousand. But Antietam, 
though for us a costly and unsatisfactory 



victory, was for the South a conclusive 
lesson. The Peter-the-Hermit excursion 
into Maryland lasted just two weeks, and 
its failure was signal and instructive. In- 
tended as an invasion that should result 
in the occupation of Washington and 
Philadelphia, it led to nothing but to 
Stuart's audacious raid into Pennsylva- 
nia with his thousand troopers — a theat- 
rical flourish to wind up an unsuccessful 
drama. As for Harper's Ferry, its over- 
whelming punishment and precipitate 
conquest were not without their use : the 
retention by the Federals of the little 
depot of army stores on the Virginia 
bank surprised and thwarted Lee. To 
reduce it, he had to pause, and ere the 
operation was complete McClellan was 
upon him, and cornered him before 
he was enabled to take up a firm posi- 
tion in Western Maryland and prepare 
for the Pennsylvania invasion. The 
Ferry fell into our hands again, but as a 
ruin. As for the elaborate bridge ap- 
proaching it, its history is the history of 
the Potomac campaign : three times has 
it been destroyed by the Confederates, 
and twice by the Unionists. Eight times 
it has been carried away by freshets. 

An earlier interest, yet intimately con- 
nected with the rebellion, belongs to 
Harper's Ferry. From the car window 
you see the old engine-house where John 
Brown fortified himself, and was wound- 
ed and captured, while these wooded 
hills were bathed with October red in 
1859. '^he breaches in the walls where 
he stood his siege are still apparent, fill- 
ed in with new brickwork. No single 
life could have been so effectually paid 
out as his was, for he cemented in the 
cause of the North the whole abolition 
sentiment of the civilized world, and 
gained our army unnumbered recruits. 
Truly said the slaves when he died, 
"Massa Brown is not buried: he is 
planted." 

Of the site of all these storied ruins 
we can only say again and again that it 
is beautiful. The rocky steeps that en- 
close the town have a Scottish air, and 
traveled visitors, beholding them, are 
fain to allude to the Trosachs ; but the 
river that rolls through the mountains. 



72 



FROM THE POTOMAC TO THE OHIO. 



and has whirled them into a hollow as 
the potter turns a vase, is continental in 
its character, and plunges through the 
landscape with a swell of eddy and a 
breadth of muscle that are like nothing 
amid the basking Scottish waters. 

On an eminence immediately over- 
looking Harper's Ferry, and some four 
hundred feet thereabove, is the enor- 
mous turtle- shaped rock, curiously block- 
ed up over a fissure, on which Jeffer- 
son once inscribed his name. Chimney 
Rock, a detached column on the Shen- 
andoah near by, is a sixty-foot high nat- 



ural tower, described by Jefferson in his 
Notes on Vi7-ginia. Upon the precipice 
across the river, on the Maryland side, 
the fancy of the tourist has discovered a 
figure of Napoleon : it forms a bas-relief 
of stupendous proportions, having the 
broad cliff for background, and clearly 
defining the hair, the Corsican profile 
and the bust, with an epaulette on the 
shoulder. The Blue Ridge, as it trav- 
erses from this point the breadth of Vir- 
ginia, breaks into various natural eccen- 
tricities — the Peaks of Otter, rising a 
mile above the sea, the Natural Bridge, 




SCENE AMONG THE MARYLAND AI.t.EGIlANIES. 



Weyer's Cave, Madison's Cave — and 
gives issue to those rich heated and min- 
eralized springs for which the State is 
famous. 

The tinge of regret with which we 
leave Harper's Ferry is mitigated by the 
hope that greater wonders may lie be- 
yond. In two miles the railroad, as if 
willing to carve out a picture-frame in 
which the heroic river may be viewed, 
excavates the " Potomac Tunnel," as it 
is named, through which the water is 
seen like a design in repousse silver, 
with two or three emerald islands in it 



for jewel-work. The perforation is eighty 
feet through, but in contrast with its rocky 
breadth our picture-frame is not too deep : 
whenever we shift our position, the view 
seems to increase in art-beauty, and as 
a final comprehensive picture it recedes 
and crowds under the spandrels of the 
arch the whole mountain-pass, with the 
confluence of the two rivers in the finest 
imaginable aspect. 

Poor Martinsburg ! during the rebel- 
lion a mere sieve, through which the 
tide of war poured back and forth in the 
various fluctuations of our fortune ! It 



FROM THE POTOMAC TO THE OHIO. 



73 



is said to have been occupied by both 
armies, alternately, fifteen times. The 
passenger sees it as a mere foreground 
of big restaurant and platform, with a 
conglomeration of village houses in the 
rear — featureless as the sheep which the 
painter of Wakefield put in for nothing. 
One incident, however, supervenes. An 
old man, with positive voice and man- 
ners, and altogether a curious specimen 
in looks, gait and outfit, comes through 
the train with a pannier of apples and 
groundnuts. He is pointed out as one 
of the men of importance in Martins- 
burg, owning a row of flourishing houses. 
With the anxious servility which wealth 
always commands, we purchase an apple 
of this capitalist, blandly choosing a 
knotty and unsalable specimen. 

Pretty soon, as we look over into 
Maryland, we have indicated for us the 
site of old Fort Frederick, until lately 
traceable, but now completely oblite- 
rated. It was an interesting relic of the 
old Indian wars. Shortly after Brad- 
dock's defeat on the Monongahela, when 
the Indians had become very bold, and 
had almost depopulated this part of 
Maryland, Fort Frederick was erected 
by Governor Sharpe as a menace, and 
garrisoned with two hundred men. It 
was an immediate moral victory, awing 
and restraining the savages, though no 
decided conflict is known to have oc- 
curred from its construction to its quiet 
rotting away within the present genera- 
tion. Those were the days when Fred- 
erick in Maryland and Chambersburg 
in Pennsylvania were frontier points, the 
AUeghanies were Pillars of Hercules, and 
all beyond was a blank ! 

Still continuing our course on the Vir- 
ginia side of the Potomac, through what 
is known in this State as the Virginia 
\'alley, while in Pennsylvania the same 
intervale is called the Cumberland Val- 
ley, we admire the increasing sense of 
solitude, the bowery wildness of the 
river-banks, and the spirited freshness 
of the hastening water. At a station of 
delightful loneliness we alight. 

Here Sir John's Run comes leaping 
from the hills to slide gurgling into the 
Potomac, and at this point we attain 



Berkeley Springs by a dragging ascent 
of two miles and a half in a comfort- 
able country stage. Sir John's Run was 
called after Sir John Sinclair, a quar- 
termaster in the doomed army of Brad- 
dock. The outlet into the Potomac is 
a scene of quiet country beauty, made 
dignified by the hills around the river. 
A hot, rustic station of two or three rooms, 
an abandoned factory building — tall, 
empty -windowed and haunted-looking 
— gone clean out for want of commerce, 
like a lamp for lack of oil. Opposite 
the station a pretty homespun tavern 
trellised with grapes, a portrait of Gen- 
eral Lee in the sitting-room, and a fat, 
buxom Virginia matron for hostess. All 
this quiet scene was once the locality of 
the hot hopes and anxieties of genius, 
and it is for this reason we linger here. 

When the little harbor at the mouth of 
Sir John's Run was still more wild and 
lonely than now, James Rumsey, a work- 
ing bath -tender at Berkeley Springs, 
launched upon it a boat that he had in- 
vented of novel principle and propulsive 
force. The force was steam, and Rum- 
sey had shown his model to Washington 
in 1780. First discoverers of steam-loco- 
motion are turning up every few months 
in embarrassing numbers, but we can- 
not feel that we have a right to suppress 
the claims of honest Rumsey, the pro- 
tege of Washington. The dates are said 
to be as follows : Rumsey launched his 
steamboat here at Sir John's Run in 1784, 
before the general and a throng of vis- 
itors from the Springs; in 1788, John 
Fitch launched another first steamboat 
on the Delaware, and sent it successfully 
up to Burlington ; in 1807, Robert Fulton 
set a third first steamboat on the Hud- 
son, the Clermont. Rumsey's motion 
was obtained by the reaction of a cur- 
rent sqiiirtcd through the stern of the 
boat against the water of the river, the 
current being pumped by steam. This 
action, so primitive, so remote from the 
principle of the engine now used, seems 
hardly worthy to be connected with the 
great revolutionary invention of steam- 
travel; yet Washington certified his opin- 
ion that "the discovery is of vast im- 
portance, and mav be of the greatest 



74 



FROM THE POTOMAC TO THE OHIO. 



usefulness in our inland navigation." 
James Rumsey, with just a suspicion of 
the irritability of talent, accused Fitch 
of "coming pottering around" his Vir- 
ginia work-bench and carrying off his 
ideas, to be afterward developed in Phil- 
adelphia. It is certain that the develop- 
ment was great. Rumsey died in Eng- 
land of apoplexy at a public lecture 
where he was explaining his contrivance. 

A sun - burnt, dark- 
eyed young Virginian 
now guides us up the 
mountain -road to the 
Springs, where we find 
a full-blown Ems set in =^^ 
the midst of the wilder- %\ 
ness. The Springs of 
Berkeley, originally in 
eluded in the estates o 
Lord Fairfax, and by 
him presented to the col- 
ony, were the first fash- 
ionable baths opened in 
this country. One half 
shudders to think how 
primitive they were in 
the first ages, when the 
pools were used by the 
sexes alternately, and 
the skurrying nymphs 
hastened to retreat at 
the notification thai 
their hour was out and 
that the gentlemen 
wanted to come in. 
They were populous 
and civilized in the pre- 
Revolutionary era when 
Washington began to 
frequent them and be- 
came part owner in the surrounding 
land. The general's will mentions his 
property in "Bath," as the settlement 
was then called. The Baroness de 
Reidesel (wife of the German general 
of that name taken with Burgoyne at 
Saratoga) spent with her invahd hus- 
band the summer of 1779 at Berkeley, 
making the acquaintance of Washing- 
ton and his family ; and whole pages of 
her memoirs are devoted to the quaint 
picture of watering-place life at that 
date. 



Berkeley Springs are probably as en- 
joyable as any on the continent. There 
is none of that aspect of desolation and 
pity-my- sorrows so common at the faded 
resorts of the unhappy South, yet a 
pleasant rurahty is impressed on the 
entertainment. The principal hotel is 
a vast building, curiously rambling in 
style : the dining-room, for instance, is 
a house in itself, planted in a garden. 




SCENE AT CUMlitRLAND NARROWS. 

Here, when the family is somewhat 
small and select, will be presented the 
marvels of Old Dominion cooking — the 
marrowy flannel-cake, the cellular waf- 
fle, the chicken melting in a beatitude 
of cream gravy : when the house is 
pressed with its hundreds of midsum- 
mer guests these choice individualities 
of kitchen chemistry are not attainable ; 
but even then the bread, the roast, the 
coffee — a great chef is known by the 
quality of his simples — are of the true 
Fifth Avenue style of excellence. Cap- 



FROM THE POTOMAC TO THE OHIO. 



75 



tain Potts (we have come to the lands 
where the hotel - keepers are military 
officers), an old moustache of the Mexi- 
can war, broods over the large establish- 
ment like the father of a great family. 
With the men he is wise on a point of 
horseflesh or the quality of the brandy ; 
with the matrons he is courtly, gallant, 
anecdotic : the young women appear to 
idolize him, and lean their pretty elbows 
on his desk half the day, for he is their 
protector, chevalier, entertainer, bonbon- 
holder, adviser and elder brother, all in 
one. Such is the landlord, as that rare 
expert is understood in the South. As 
for the regimen, it is the rarest kind of 
Pleasure made Medicinal, and that must 
be the reason of its efficacy. There is 
a superb pool of tepid water for the gen- 
tlemen to bathe in : a similar one, ex- 
tremely discreet, for the ladies. Besides 
these, of which the larger is sixty feet 
long, there are individual baths, drink- 
ing fountains in arbors, sulphur and iron 
springs, all close to the hotel. The wa- 
ter, emerging all the year round at a 
temperature of about seventy-five de- 
grees, remains unfrozen in winter to the 
distance of a mile or more along the 
rivulet by which it escapes. The flavor 
is so little nauseous that the pure issue 
of the spring is iced for ordinary table 
use ; and this, coupled with the fact that 
we could not detect the slightest unusual 
taste, gave us the gravest doubts about 
the trustworthiness of this mineral foun- 
tain's old and unblemished reputation : 
another indication is, that they have 
never had the liquid analyzed. But the 
gouty, the rheumatic, the paralyzed, the 
dyspeptic, who draw themselves through 
the current, and let the current draw 
itself through them, are content with no 
such negative virtues for it, and assign 

To Berkeley every virtue under heaven. 

The mountain-village known to Wash- 
ington as " Bath " is still a scene of fash- 
ionable revel : the over-dressed children 
romp, the old maids flirt, the youthful 
romancers spin in each other's arms to 
music from the band, and dowagers 
carefully drink at the well from the 
old-fashioned mug decorated with Poor 



Richard's maxims ; but the festivities 
have a decorous and domestic look that 
would meet the pity of one of the regular 
ante-rebellion bloods. After the good 
people have retired at an early hour, we 
fancy the ghost of a lofty Virginia swell 
standing in the moonlight upon the 
piazza, which he decorates with gleams 
of phantom saliva. Attended by his 
teams of elegant horses, and surround- 
ed by a general halo of gambling, 
racing, tourneying and cock - fighting, 
he seems to shake his lank hair sadly 
over the poor modern carnival, and say, 
"Their tameness is shocking to me." 

There is a good deal of honest sport 
still to be had in the adjacent hills : the 
streams yield trout, and various larger 
prey, for which the favorite bait is a 
small ugly fish called helgamite. The 
woods contain turkeys, pheasants, quail 
and woodcock. The region has a valu- 
able interpreter in the person of General 
David H. Strother, so agreeably known 
to the public as "Porte Crayon," whose 
father was lessee of the Springs, and 
who at one period himself conducted the 
hotel. He addicts himself now to pen 
and pencil solely. In the village, where 
he presides over a pretty cottage home, 
he has quite a circle of idolaters : the 
neighbors' houses display on their walls 
his sketches of the village eccentrics, 
attended by those accessories of dog or 
gun or nag which always stamp the 
likeness, and make the rustic critic cry 
but, "Them's his very features!" A 
large, boisterous painting in the hotel 
represents his impressions of the village 
arena in his youth ; and ancient game- 
sters, gray-headed now, hke to stroll in 
and contemplate their own portraits 
grouped around the cock-pit in all the 
hot blood of bettmg days and in the 
green dress-coats of 1 840. Strother ( now 
an active graybeard) was profoundly 
stirred by the outbreak of the rebellion. 
His friends were slaveholders and Con- 
federates : he lived upon the mountain- 
line dividing the rich, proud, noble rebels 
of the eastern counties from the hungry 
and jealous loyalists of W^est Virginia. 
He himself loved the State as Bruce 
loved Scotland, but he loved country 



76 



FROM THE POTOMAC TO THE OHIO. 



better. He shut himself up with his dis- 
tracting problem for three days in utter 
privacy : he emerged with his mind 
made up, a Union soldier. 

" It must have been awkward for a Vir- 
ginian to cast his lot against Virginia," 
we observed to the stagedriver who bore 
us back to the station — an ex-Federal 
soldier and a faithful devotee of Cray- 
on's. 

"No awkwarder than for Virginia to 
go against her country : 
that's how zuc looked at 
it," retorted the patriot. ^^ ms 

Bidding adieu to 
Berkeley and its pater- 
nal landlord, we resume 
the steel road (that well- 
worn phrase of the " iron 
way" is a complete mis- 
nomer) with another 
glance of familiarity at 
the beautiful confluence 
of Sir John's Run with 
the Potomac, where the 
sunny waters still seem -^ 
to murmur of the land- 
ing of Braddock's army 
and the novel disturb- 
ance of James Ram- 
sey's steamer. The 
mountains extending 
from this point, the re- 
cesses of the Blue Ridge, 
in their general trend 
south-westerly through 
the State, are one great 
pharmacy of curative 
waters. Jordan and 
Capper Springs, in the 
neighborhood of Win- 
chester, 1 i e thirty or 
forty miles to the south; and beneath 
those are imbedded the White, Black, 
Yellow, and we know not how many 
other colors in the general spectrum 
of Sulphurs. It would perhaps be 
our duty to indicate more exactly the 
Bethesdas of this vast natural sanita- 
rium, to which our present course gives 
us the key, but that task has already 
been performed, in a complete and very 
attractive manner, by Mr. Edward A. 
Pollard in his little work The Vir<rinia 



Tourist. Our present task is to attain 
the main wall of the Alleghany Moun- 
tains, which we do at the town of Cum- 
berland, after passing through the grand 
curved tunnel at Pawpaw Ridge, and 
crossing Little Cacapon Creek, and trav- 
ersing the South Branch, which is the 
larger and true Potomac, and admiring 
the lofty precipices, with arched and vault- 
ed strata, on South Branch Mountain and 
at Kelly's Rocks and Patterson Creek. 




CLIFF VIEW, CUMBERLAND NARROWS. 

It is but a prosaic consideration, but 
the bracing air of the mountain-ride from 
Berkeley Springs down to the railway 
station, and the rapid career thence to 
Cumberland, have given us the appetites 
of ogres. We carry our pilgrim scrip 
into the town of Cumberland without 
much hope of having it generously till- 
ed, for this coaly capital, lost among its 
mountains, had formerly the saddest of 
reputations for hospitality. The three 
or four little taverns were rivals in the 



FROM THE POTOMAC TO THE OHIO. 



77 



art of how not to diet. Accordingly, our 
surprise is equal to our satisfaction when 
we find every secret of a grand hotel 
perfectly understood and put in practice 
at the "Oueen City," the large house 
built and conducted by the railway com- 
pany. A competent Chicago purveyor, 
Mr. H. M. Kinsley, who has the office 
of general manager of the hotels be- 
longing to the corporation, resides here 
as at the head quarters of his depart- 
ment, and is blessed every day by the 
flying guests from the railway-trains, as 
well as the permanent boarders who use 
Cumberland as a mountain-resort. The 
choicest dainties from the markets of 
Baltimore, laid tenderly on ice in that 
city and brought as freight in the light- 
ning trains of the road, are cooked for 
the tables, and the traveler "exercised 
in woes," who used to groan over salt 
pork and dreadful dodgers, now finds 
the "groaning" transferred to the over- 
loaded board. The house is now in all 
the charm of freshness and cleanliness, 
hospitably furnished, with deep piazza, 
a pretty croquet-lawn with fountain, and 
other modern attractions, the whole sur- 
rounded with what is no small gain in a 
muddy Maryland town — a broad Schil- 
linger cement pavement, which, like Mr. 
Wopsle's acting, may be praised as 
"massive and concrete." 

By day, Cumberland is quite given 
over to carbon : drawing her supplies 
from the neighboring mining-town of 
Frostburg, she dedicates herself devout- 
ly to coals. All day long she may be 
seen winding around her sooty neck, 
hke an African queen, endless chains 
and trains and rosaries of black dia- 
monds, which never tire of passing 
through the enumeration of her jeweled 
fingers. At night the scene is more 
beautiful. We clambered up the near- 
est hill at sunset, while the colored light 
was draining into the pass of Wills' 
Mountain as into a vase, and the lamps 
of the town sprang gradually into sight 
beneath us. The surrounding theatre 
of mountains had a singularly calm and 
noble air, recalling the most enchanted 
days of Rome and the Campagna. The 
curves of the hills are marvels of sway- 



ing grace, depending from point to point 
with the elegance of draperies, and seat- 
ing the village like a gem in the midst 
of "great laps and folds of sculptor's 
work." The mechanics and miners, as 
twilight deepened, began to lead their 
sweethearts over these beautiful hills, so 
soft in outline that no paths are neces- 
sary. The clouds of fireflies made an 
effect, combining with the village lights 
below. Then as night deepened, as if 
they were the moving principle of all 
the enchantment, the company's rolling- 
mills, like witches' kettles, began to spirt 
enormous gouts of flame, which seemed 
to cause their heavy roofs to flutter like 
the lids of seething caldrons. 

The commanding attraction of the 
western journey is necessarily the pas- 
sage of the AUeghanies. The climb be- 
gins at Piedmont, and follows an ascent 
which in eleven consecutive miles pres- 
ents the rare grade of one hundred and 
sixteen feet per mile. The first tableau 
of real sublimity, perhaps, occurs in fol- 
lowing up a stream called Savage River. 
The railway, like a slender spider's 
thread, is seen hanging at an almost 
giddy height up the endless mountain- 
side, and curved hither and thither in 
such multiplied windings that enormous 
arcs of it can always be seen from the 
flying window of the car. The woods, 
green with June or crimson with Novem- 
ber, clamber over each other's shoulders 
up the ascent ; but as we attain the ele- 
vation of two hundred feet above the 
Savage, their tufted tops form a soft and 
mossy embroidery beneath us, diminish- 
ing in perspective far down the cleft of 
the ravine. As we turn the flank of the 
great and stolid Backbone Mountain we 
command the mouth of another stream, 
pouring in from the south-west : it is a 
steeply -enclosed, hill-cleaving torrent, 
which some lover of plays and cider, 
recollecting Shakespeare's Midsummer 
Night's slumber beneath the crabapple 
boughs, has named Crabtree Creek. 
There is a point where the woody gorges 
of both these streams can be command- 
ed at once by the eye, and Nature gives 
us few landscape ^i7/rt'(Z«/j more primi- 
tively wild and magnificent than these. 



78 



FROM THE POTOMAC TO TIJE OHIO. 



This ascent was made by the engi- 
neers of the company in the early days 
of raih'oads, and when no one knew at 
what angle the friction of wheels upon 
rails would be overcome by gravity. On 
the trial-trip the railroad president kept 
close to the door, meaning, in the case 
of possible discomfiture and retrogres- 
sion, to take to the woods ! But all went 
well, and in due time was reached, as 
we now reach it, Altamont, the alpine 
village perched two 
thousand six hundred 
and twenty - six feet 
above the tide. 

The interest of the 
staircase we have run 
up depends greatly on 
its pioneer character. 
No mountain-chain had 
been crossed by a loco- 
motive before the AUe- 
ghanies were outraged, 
as we see them, here 
and by this track. As 
the railroad we follow 
was the first to take 
existence in this coun- 
try, excepting some 
short mining roads, so 
the grade here used was 
the first of equal steep- 
ness, saving on some 
English roads of inferior 
length and no moun- 
tainous prestige. Here 
the engineer, like Van 
Amburgh in the lion's 
den, first planted his 
conqueror's foot upon 
the mane of the wilder- 
ness ; and in this spot 
modern science first claimed the right 
to reapply that grand word of a French 
monarch, " // ny a plus dc Pyrenees F' 

We are on the crest of the Alleghanies. 
On either side of the mountain-pass we 
have threaded rise the higher summits 
of the range ; but, though we seem from 
the configuration of the land to be in a 
valley, we are met at every turn by the 
indications familiar to mountain-tops — 
indications that are not without a special 
desolation and pathos. Though all is 



green with summer, we can see that the 
vegetation has had a dolorous struggle 
for existence, and that the triumph of 
certain sparse trees here and there is 
but the survival of the strongest. They 
stand scattered and scraggy, like indi- 
vidual bristles on a bald pate. Their 
spring has been borrowed from summer, 
for the leafage here does not begin until 
late in June. The whole scenery seems 
to array itself for the tourist like a coun- 




s»';>y8ii«?>>— - 



\ ALLEY I ALLS, \\ Lb I Mr.CLNL\. 

try wife, with many an incompleteness 
in its toilet, and with a kind of haggard 
apology for being late. Rough log- 
houses stand here and there among the 
laurels. The tanned gentlemen stand- 
ing about look like California miners, as 
you see them in the illustrations to Bret 
Harte's stories. Through this landscape, 
roughly blocked out, and covered still 
with Nature's chips and shavings — and 
seeming for that very reason singularly 
fresh and close to her mighty hand — we 



FROM THE POTOMAC TO THE OHIO. 



79 



fly for twenty miles. We are still as- 
cending, and the true apex of our path 
is only reached at the twentieth. This 
was the climax which poet Willis came 
out to reach in a spirit of intense curios- 
ity, intent to peer over and see what was 
on the other side of the mountains, and 
with some idea, as he says, of hanging 
his hat on the evening star. His dis- 
gust, as a bard, when he found that the 
highest point was only named "Cran- 
berry Summit," was sublime. 

"Willis was particularly struck," said 
the landlord of the Glades Hotel, "with 
a quality of whisky we had hereabouts 
at the time of his visit. In those days, 
before the ' revenue,' an article of rich 
corn whisky was made in small quan- 
tities by these Maryland farmers. Mr. 
Willis found it agree with him particu- 
larly well, for it's as pure as water, and 
slips through your teeth like flaxseed tea. 
I explained to him how it gained in qual- 
ity by being kept a few years, becoming 
like noble old brandy. Mr. Willis was 
fired with the idea, and took a barrel 
along home with him, in the ambitious 
intention of ripening it. In less than six 
months," pursued the Boniface with a 
humorous twinkle in his eyes, "he sent 
for another barrel." 

The region where we now find our- 
selves among these mountain-tops is 
known as the Glades — a range of ele- 
vated plateaux marked with all the signs 
of a high latitude, but flat enough to be 
spread with occasional patches of dis- 
couraged farms. The streams make 
their way into the Youghiogheny, and 
so into the Ohio and Gulf of Mexico, for 
we have mounted the great watershed, 
and have long ago crossed both branches 
of the sun -seeking Potomac ! We are 
in a region that particularly justifies the 
claim of the locomotive to be the great 
discoverer of hidden retreats, for never 
will you come upon a place more obvi- 
ously disconcerted at being found out. 
The screams of the whistle day by day 
have inserted no modern ideas into this 
mountain-cranium, which, like Lord John 
Russell's, must be trepanned before it 
can be enlightened. The (ilades are 
sacred to deer, bears, trout. But the fatal 



rails guide to them an unceasing proces- 
sion of staring citizens, and they are 
filled in the fine season with visitors from 
Cincinnati and Baltimore. For the com- 
fort of these we find established in the 
Glades two dissimilar hotels. 

The first hostelry is the Deer Park 
Hotel, just finished, and really admi- 
rable in accommodations. It is a large 
and very tasteful structure, with the gen- 
eral air of a watering-place sojourn of 
the highest type — a civilized- looking 
fountain playing, and the familiar thun- 
der of the bowling-alley forming bass to 
the click of the billiard-room. Here, as 
in Cumberland, we find an artificial for- 
wardness of the dinner-table in the midst 
of the most unpromising circumstances. 
The daintiest meats and cates are served 
by the deftest waiters. The fact is, the 
hotel is owned by the company, and 
the dinners are wafted over, in Arabian 
Nights fashion, from the opulent markets 
of Baltimore. To prepare a feast, in this 
desolation, fit for the nuptials of kings 
and emperors, would be a very simple 
matter of the telegraph. Altogether, 
the aspect of this ornate, audacious-look- 
ing summer palace is the strangest thing, 
just where it is, to be seen on the moun- 
tains. The supreme sweetness of the 
air, the breath of pine and hemlock, the 
coolness of midsummer nights, make 
the retreat a boon for July and August. 
In autumn, among the resplendent and 
tinted mountain-scenery, with first-rate 
sport in following the Alleghany deer, 
the charms are perhaps greater. 

The other resting-place of which we 
spoke is at the Glades Hotel in the town 
of Oakland — the same in which Mr. Wil- 
lis quenched his poetic thirst. Oakland, 
looking already old and quaint, though 
it is a creation of the railroad, sits imme- 
diately under the sky in its mountain, in 
a general dress and equipage of white- 
washed wooden houses. A fine stone 
church, however, of aspiring Gothic, 
forms a contrast to the whole encamp- 
ment, and seems to have been quickly 
caught up out of a wealthy city : it is a 
monumental tribute by the road-presi- 
dent, Mr. Garrett, to a deceased brother; 
the county, too, in its name of Garrett, 



8o 



FROM THE POTOMAC TO THE OHIO. 



bears testimony to the same powerful and 
intelligent family. As for the "Glades," 
it is kept by Mr. Dailey in the grand old 
Southern style, and the visitor, very like- 
ly for the first time in his life, feels that 
he is at home. It is a curious thing that 
the sentiment of the English inn, the 
priceless and matchless feeling of com- 
fort, has now completely left the mother- 



country to take refuge with some fine old 
Maryland or Virginia landlord, whose 
ideas were formed before the war. We 
have at the "Glades" a specimen. In 
Captain Potts of Berkeley we found an- 
other. This kind of landlord, in fact, 
should be a captain, a general or a 
major, in order to fill his role perfectly. 
He is the patron and companion of his 




FISH CREhK VALLEY, WEST VIRGINIA. 



guests, looking to their amusement with 
all the solicitude of a private household- 
er. His manners are filled with a beam- 
ing, sympathedc and exquisite courtesy. 
He is necessarily a gentleman in his 
manners, having all his life lived that 
sporting, playful, supervisory and white- 
handed existence proper at once to the 
master of a plantation and the owner of 
a hotel. His society is constantly sought, 
his table is pounced upon by ladies with 
backgammon in the morning, by gen- 
tlemen with decks of cards at night. 
Always handsome, sunburnt, and with 
unaffected good-breeding, he is the king 
of his delicious realm, the beloved des- 
pot of his domain. We have left our- 
selves, in sketching the general cha- 
racter, no space to descend to particulars 
on Mr. Dailey ; but he was all the time 



before us as a sitter when we made the 
portrait. A stroll with him around his 
farm, and to his limpid little chalybeate 
spring, after one of his famously-cooked 
breakfasts of trout and venison, leaves 
an impression of amity that you would 
not take away from many private coun- 
try-houses. 

The affluents of the Little and Great 
Yok (so the Youghiogheny is locally 
called) are still stocked with trout, while 
a gentleman of Oakland has abundance 
of the fish artificially breeding in his 
"ladders," and sells the privilege of net- 
ting them at a dollar the pound. As for 
the wild fish, we were informed by a 
sharp boy who volunteered to show us 
the chalybeate spring, and who guided 
us through the woods barefoot, making 
himself ill with "sarvice" berries as he 



FROM THE POTOMAC TO THE OHIO. 



went, — we were instructed by this natu- 
ralist that the trout were eaten away from 
the streams " by the alligators." This we 
regarded as a sun-myth, or some other 
form of aboriginal superstition, until we 
were informed by several of the gravest 
and most trustworthy gentlemen of sev- 
eral different localities on the mountains 
that there really is a creature infesting 
these streams supposed by them to be a 
young alligator, reaching a length of 
twelve inches, and doubtless subsisting 
on fish. An alligator as a mountain-rep- 
tile had not entered into our conception : 



can these voracious saurians, playing in 
the alpine affluents of the Mississippi, 
possibly be identical with the vast and 
ugly beasts of the lower bayous and the 
Gulf? We leave the identification for 
some reptile-loving philosopher. 

Descending the western slope of the 
mountains, we prick up our attention, 
although the grade is gradual and easy. 
We know that we are coming to the 
crowning glory of the ride, the region 
celebrated for its more than Arcadian 
beauty, and consecrated by the earliest 
glories of our war — by the mountain 




CHEAT RIVER VALLEY AND MOUNTAINS. 



Iliad of McClellan, the initial action at 
Philippi, and the prompt trampling out 
of West Virginia secession by the vic- 
tories of Cheat River. This tameless, 
mountain-lapped, hemlock-tinted river 
had long been our. fancied cynosure. 
"Each mortal hashis Carcassonne, "said, 
after a French poet, the late lamented 
John R. Thompson, using the term for 
what is long desired and never attained ; 
and Mr. Matthew Arnold, in writing of a 
"French Eton," says, "Whatever you 
miss, do not miss seeing Carcassonne." 
As Carcassonne exists in French land- 
scape, exists in the tourist's mind and 
6 



desire, a standard of beauty and historic 
suggestion, such to us had become this 
swart and noble river. Now it happens 
that Thompson has left a description, 
in his most polished prose, of glorious 
Cheat River. As our own powers of 
description are very inferior, we make 
no scruple of borrowing, or, as Reade 
calls it. "jewel-setting:" "The grandest 
achievement of the engineer (whose 
name, Benjamin H. Latrobe, should 
always be stated in connection with the 
road) is to be found, however, in the 
region of Cheat River, where to the un- 
scientific eye it would appear almost 



82 



FROM THE POTOMAC TO THE OHIO. 



impossible that a road-bed could ever 
have been built. For two miles beyond 
Rowlesburg, where the Cheat River is 
crossed on a massive bridge of iron, 
there is a continuous succession of mar- 
vels in railway-work, of which the Tray 
Run viaduct is a dream of lightness and 
grace, yet so firm in its welded strength 
that thousands of tonsof 
merchandise pass over '-■ 

it daily without causing ^^ 

the slightest oscillation 
of its airy arches. Here, ^^ 

too, the wonders of me- 
chanical skill are placed 
in striking juxtaposition 
with the wonders of Na- 
ture, whose obduracy 
has been so signally 
overcome. The sense of 
security was heighten- 
ed in our case by a furi- 
ous storm which burst 
upon us. We were seat- 
ed on the fender or ' cow- 
catcher,' watching the 
majestic marshaling of 
the thunder-clouds over 
the mountain-tops, and 
enjoying to the full the 
excitement of the mo- 
ment, when suddenly 
the wind blew a terrific 
gust, filling the air with 
dust and dry leaves, and 
threatening to carry us 
individually over the — 

precipice. The train 
was stopped, and we 
sought shelter in the comfortable car, 
which then moved on through the driv- 
ing floods that continued to descend for 
half an hour, forming cataracts on every 
side of us. But the water ran off harm- 
lessly from the solid track, and our en- 
gine bade defiance to the tempest, which 
hurled huge branches of the trees into the 
angry abyss beneath. The triumph of 
Science over Nature was complete ; and 
as the sinking sun threw a glow over 
the Glades where the clouds had part- 
ed, I think my companions caught some 
inspirations of the ' Poetry of the Rail- 
way.' " 



At Grafton we have choice of two 
routes : one, to Wheeling, leads us by 
the beaudful scenery of the Tygart, 
where the Valley River Falls are laugh- 
ing and glistening all day and all night, 
and by the stupendous BoUman bridge 
at Bellaire, almost two miles long, to 
Wheeling:. But we continue on a straisrht 




CHEAT RIVER NARROWS. 

course to Cincinnati, having promised 
ourselves to see the contrast between the 
City of Monuments and the Metropolis 
of Pork. Grafton offers us the accom- 
modations of another of the company's 
hotels, where, as at Cumberland, we are 
daintily and tenderly fed. At Parkers- 
burg we find another superb bridge, over 
a mile in length ; at Athens an imposing 
insane asylum, to take care of us if all 
these engineering wonders have deprived 
us of our senses ; and finally in Cincin- 
nati, just a day after our departure from 
Baltimore, the gleam of the Ohio River 
and the fulfillment of our intention. 






"MAY" IN JUNE, 







^ '""*' ^ Hi|*M)*#-'^-*-%^ 




SURF-BATHING. 



AH," said once the caz'ssz'er of the 
Grand Hotel dii Louvre, "if all 
my clients were Americans !" This fer- 
vent wish was uttered when Mr. Merri- 
mac of Marblehead had just paid his 
month's bill for lodgment of self, wife 
and five tall girls without grumbling at 
the charges for service, for bougies, car- 
riages, fires and detriment to furniture 
which decorated and gave incident to 



that impressive document. It probably 
never entered into the imagination of 
this worthy major-domo that there are 
actually hotels in the world where the 
guests are substantially all Americans. 
His fancy would have reeled back from 
the delicious picture. But at one of our 
crowded summer-haunts, such as Sara- 
toga, every bill is paid by cheerful Amer- 
ican payers in whom is no guile, and the 

83 



84 



"MAY" IN JUNE. 



crowd of idealized patrons at any one 
house is multiplied by the dozens of 
hostelries composing the resort. The 
American hotel-guest indeed is the sanc- 
tified and purified ideal of what a client 
should be in the landlord's view. He 
has none of the European traveler's 
vices. He does not tyrannize over and 
nag at the waiters nor jangle the bells 
as a summons to the proprietor for sup- 
posed derelictions, like an Englishman; 
he does not sputter and sprawl and gor- 
mandize, and afterward haggle over the 
bill, like the bia: French vicomte : he 



does not bargain for a cheaper room 
among the garrets, and befoul his nest 
with cigar- ends and kirsch-bottles, like 
the German baron ; he does not wail 
over the quality of his wine, or destroy 
the riding-horse he has hired with goad- 
ing, or send a dozen waiters to collect 
the materials for his salad, and then 
some night fold up his discontent and 
insolvently steal away, like the Italian. 
In contrast to these various insubordinate 
and undutiful types the American tourist 
is a chastened saint. He expects his 
accommodation to be little or nothing, 




PORCH Ul' IHK brocKUJiN Huubh. 



and the bill for that little long. He is 
grateful if the hotel-clerk will look at 
him, and a civil remark from this poten- 
tate will set him up for a whole morning. 
He ties on his bib at dinner, and watches 
with delight the distant waiters talking 
gossip with each other, meanwhile amus- 
ing himself with rattling his knife and 
fork, as good as gold. When he needs 
a pitcher of water in his chamber, he 
peals for hours on his bell, then genially 
puts his head into the corridor, appeal- 
ing to some domestic, who chills him by 
saying that this is not his flo', sah, and 
perhaps in the end saunters easily into 
the dining-room, to replenish his ewer 
himself from the water - cooler. These 
particulars, however, do not show the 



American hotel-guest in his very loftiest 
aspect. His true canonization comes, 
like Saint Bartholomew's, when he is 
being flayed. At Saratoga, for instance, 
in those streets of crazy cardboard, lace- 
edged palaces, there are mornings when 
the whole population is caught exhibit- 
ing some of the highest qualities of saint- 
ship. There is an hegira : the belle of 
the place has left over night or the cele- 
brated millionaire family is summoned 
to a funeral, and "good form" demands 
that everybody who is anybody must 
stay not on the order of his going, but 
go at once. On such days the matin 
hotel -clerk is besieged with offers of 
money. He resembles then at once 
some popular priest in a Roman con- 



'MAY" IN JUNE. 



85 



is^"ss^^fi^?Ki 



..fljfciLi^&:«^ tc:^*^ — 



.4;i-:T ~^4 




CAPE MAY, FROM THE OCEAN. 



fessional and a croupier at San Carlo 
raking in the night's profits. The crowd 
ask no questions, make no calculations : 
they only want to pay. They entreat, 
they implore, they shove and push each 
other, they employ little ruses to get 
ahead of their neighbors, in order that 
they may strip themselves of their sub- 
stance and lay the contents of their 
purses on the altar of the establishment. 
The liquidation is made without ques- 
tion or complaint. Extras are charged 
at tremendous rates ; carriage, porter- 
age, leverage, average and beverage are 
computed at strangely-dilated sums; the 
guest, having arrived at twilight of Sat- 
urday and leaving early on Monday, is 
charged, in the clerk's magnificent arith- 
metic, for three days ; there has been an 
unaccountable failure of provisions, the 
commonest dishes at table have been 
lacking or uneatable, and the guest, be- 
sides, has perhaps been of a migratory 
turn and has supported himself on clams 
at little restaurants ; yet he never dreams 
of cheapening. Everybody pays royal- 
ly, cheerily, and with gratification. It 
is pretty to hear Mr. Dawkins pluming 
himself to Mr. Hawkins on the enormous 
magnitude of his bill, and boasting of 
the discomforts and sufferings of his so- 
journ. Let not asceticism boast that the 
saints are all its own : here is a city of 
mundane martyrs, the victmns of world- 
liness rejoicing in their torments. 

This picture, if it has any truth in it. 



is a somewhat unflattering one for the 
American hotel, however favorable for 
the meek sojourners who make it their 
Thebaid. Let us, therefore, being neither 
stuff for saints nor martyrs, see if we 
cannot find a resort which will afford the 
cheerfulness, the social variety, the en- 
tertaining crowd of the national wa- 
tering-place, and even the spectacle of 
fashion and opulent splendor, without 
extortion and without suffering. Now, 
in prosecuting this search we will test a 
principle. The principle shall be that 
the Southern coast has a tendency to be 
warm, attractive, cheery, hospitable, im- 
perfectly provisioned, impoverished and 
slatternly ; the Northern, well-disciplined, 
calculating, closely-regulated, dear, flinty 
and skinflinty, and that in direct propor- 
tion to the distance from centres of pro- 
vision. We have repeatedly found the 
Northern landlord dry, civil, cool, capa- 
ble and extortionate — the Southern, hos- 
pitable, genial, but practically impotent. 
Neither of these landlords is precisely 
comfortable. Now, on the long barom- 
eter of the coast there must be some spot 
that is exactly at the fair-weather point, 
equidistant from wintriness and from sul- 
triness. If we proceed on the strictest 
principle of geographical measurement, 
we find that the great centre of alimen- 
tation is in the garden region of Penn- 
sylvania, Delaware and Maryland, and 
that the chosen resort, equally accessible 
to the great social emporiums of Phila- 



86 



"MAY" IN JUNE. 



delphia and Baltimore, ought to be about 
where the map-maker prints the name 
"Cape May." 

Stout Cornehs Mey, who first explored 
the bay of the Delaware, and defended 
the channel with a fort, and manned the 
fort with his callous, sole-leather-breech- 




ed sailors, and left his name to sleep in 
the Lethean ooze of Cape May, may be 
conceived as lying asleep, like Rip among 
the Catskills, upon that extremity of the 
enormous Jersean peninsula of which he 
was the godfather. Two hundred and 
fifty-two years have passed since the fat 



Holland captain set up his "Fort Nas- 
sau," and grouped about his clean and 
tidy villagers in the likeness of the Dutch 
dorp at home. He has slept sound enough 
since then in the memory of an ungrate- 
ful continent : let us fancy him sleeping 
in reality. 

If Cornelis Mey is 
to be waked by any 
discord in the world, 
it ought to be by 
the sleep -dispelling 
gong imported by us 
— worse luck ! — from 
China. The frightful 
cymbals are clash- 
ing on this bright 
summer day from 
dozens of hotels : he 
has heard them in 
J far Cathay, scaring 

< away with such a 
^ din the imaginary 

2 dragon from the sun. 
I The spirit of Captain 

3 Mey erects itself into 
i a sitting posture, 

based upon its bulb- 
^ ous leather breeches, 
% and rubs its Leyden 
z spectacles at the 
jj strange sight before 

< it. Instead of the 
3 loneliness of an un- 
explored bay, bro- 
ken only by the tub- 
like boats of the 
Dutch or the birch- 
bark gondolas of a 
few adventurous sav- 
ages, the navigator 
beholds a populous 
and flashing city laid 
out upon the ocean, 
whose waters are 
cut by yachts and 
steamboats. The city 

is glittering and many-windowed, like a 
line of palaces. Honest Mey has seen, 
when he has stolen in among the mer- 
chant-craft of the Giudecca, the struc- 
tures of Venice in her splendor as they 
spread like beaded bubbles along the sea : 
to his dazzled eye the vision is like Ven 



'MAY" IN JUNE. 



87 



ice. " It is a silly dream," says the prac- 
tical ghost : " even allowing for the lapse 
of time and the hundred-years' Dutch 
slumbers which Washington Irving is 
going to invent, the thing is impossible. 



I know this coast : I sally down from my 
fort every week when the sailing is good. 
It is a coast of simple pewter-sand and 
quicksand. My dame shall scour her 
porringer into a church-chalice before 




THE OCEAN HOUSE. 



they shall build cities on these beaches." 
And, much discomfited, the spirit turns 
to sleep again. 

Cape May City, as viewed from the 
ocean, is really imposing, and is, we be- 
lieve, the most elaborate and finished 
city that has ever been built where there 
is no rock or coherent foundation, and 
where the loose sand of the sea-shore 
stretches up to the line of houses. At 
least, we have never seen, and know not 
where to point out, a town of so much 
architectural pretension laid out loose, as 
it were, on the sands. To say, however, 
that the ponderous edifices everywhere 



around are strewn merely on the sand, 
like beached boats, would of course not 
be literally correct. When preparations 
were made, some seven years ago, to 
plant the foundations of the largest of 
these structures — the Stockton House — 
some careful diggings were undertaken 
which thoroughly exposed the nature of 
the substrata. The geological results 
are to be seen in glass tubes in the hall 
of the Stockton, indicating the successive 
strata to a vastly greater depth than is 
reached in laying the foundations of a 
house. The situation, being to the east- 
ward of the older buildings, was distrust- 



88 



'A/AY" IN JUNE. 



ed by many builders: it was low and 
boggy, with a landscape of salt marshes 
into which it seemed that any weighty 
building would sink as a stone sinks into 
snow. Digging revealed, however, at a 
small depth, not indeed a ledge of stone 
— you would bore many a score of feet 
without reaching much of that — but a 
deep bed of firm, tenacious clay — a solid 




CAPE MAY LIGH THOUSE. 

foundation of Nature's eternal, unbaked 
brick. Sinking the foundation to this 
stratum, the vast hotel was imbedded on 
the unyielding clay ; and you may walk 
through any of the four hundred cham- 
bers of the Stockton and see whether 
the plastering has cracked or there are 
any other indications of settling. 

It is the rattle and clash from the 
Stockton which we imagine to have 
principally evoked the stolid Dutch spirit 
of the explorer from its long rest. The 
Stockton is a triumphant and glorious 
type of the native American caravanserai, 
with its discomforts diminished as nearly 
to zero as possible, and its undeniable 
conveniences gathered into one power- 
ful combination. It is not in this beauti- 
ful palazzo that the American tourist will 
learn to be discontented or to quarrel with 
his accommodation?. 

The company at the Stockton, as rep- 
resented on some "heavy day" at the 



close of June, when the four hundred 
guest - chambers are emptied into the 
court and piazzas, their waistcoats well 
filled from a generous table, and the 
music of Dodsworth's band gently tick- 
ling their ears, are as contented a com- 
pany as can be found in any American 
hotel. They have been fed with choice 
provisions from one of the richest mar- 
kets in the world, served in their 
prime. They have been lodged 
in pretty rooms fitted with wal- 
nut furniture. The mattresses 
have been springy and devoid 
of lumps. The dining-room is a 
rich flower-garden, where crys- 
tal and silver perennially bloom 
on beds of soft rich tablecloth : 
warm relays of delicate food, 
appreciated by pursy, unctuous 
gourmands, succeed each other 
day and evening. The balls are 
gay and crowded, the society is 
good. Generals and bankers and 
railroad-managers, the " elect" of 
American life, have jostled each 
other in the monstrous saloons all 
day and every day, and the floors 
have been studiously swept with 
the best clothes of the wives and 
daughters of these magnates. So, 
when pay-day comes, and the tourist re- 
sumes his progress toward the successive 
royal stations of Long Branch, Saratoga, 
Niagara, Newport and the White Moun- 
tains, he is a contented and cheerfully- 
paying tourist, feeling that whatever ex- 
tortions are in store for him farther North, 
Cape May has given him the equivalent 
of his money. It is a forced and facti- 
tious ideal of comfort, perhaps. Corne- 
lls Mcy, in his dreams of improvement, 
may think of nothing better than curds- 
and-whey served by a lymphatic maid 
in wooden shoes, or than Rhenish wine 
drunk tete-a-tete with a similar maid out 
of deep Venice glasses, as you see in the 
pictures of Jan Steen and Van der Heist. 
But increasing civilization brings its re- 
sponsibilities, and the nineteenth cen- 
tury demands Dutch cleanliness, Venice 
glass and Roman luxury, all at once. 

A marine city sets its best front toward 
the ocean ; so our imaginary vision of 



'MAY" IN JUNE. 



the resuscitated godfather of Cape May 
had best be taken from seaward. The 
problem of the builder in such a loca- 
tion is to make everything face toward 
the water. Visitors are firmly persuaded 
that all rooms can be made to face the 
beach, and the architect who could build 



in the fashion of a honeycomb, with 
every cell opening directly upon the sea- 
view, would be the man for the guests' 
approval and the landlord's money. Ac- 
cordingly, every window is cut, every 
balcony is opened, every cornice and 
carving is moulded, every cupola lifted. 




WAITING FOR I HE TRAIN. 



every flagstaff raised, in the direction of 
the water : you would think the fishes, 
and not the biped inhabitants of solid 
earth, were to be the critics and judges 
of all this carpentry and effect. One of 
our engravings gives this view : it is the 
view the sea sees. On the right of the 
picture you are struck with an immense 
pile of building, stretching out two gigan- 
tic wings toward the shore, in whose em- 
brace is sketched a delicate little sum- 
mer-house. This is the Stockton, im- 
proved with the addition of the contem- 
plated extension, which the artist assur- 
edly never beheld save with the eye of 
faith : even without this lateral increment, 
however, Stockton is an architectural Ti- 
tan. Except the giddy palace-fronts of 
Saratoga, which strike the eye with all 
the amazement and incredulity of a 
scene-painter's hollow screens, we do not 
know where a more imposing pleasure- 
structure can be found. It is American 



to the core — sumptuous, boastful, daring, 
soaring, expansive: it is "home" mul- 
tiplied by the hundred— a city rather 
than an inn. When we think that such 
a Palace of the Caesars is meant for a 
twelve weeks' occupation merely, and 
that for the greater part of the year it 
nods in costly uselessness, a burden and 
an expense, our mind is staggered at the 
thought of so much solid preparation 
and so much waste. This giant is alive 
for a short summer merely, after which 
the life retires from its vast bones, and it 
frowns upon the waste, as idle as a tem- 
ple at Passtum. 

Well, this vast building is seven years 
old, as we said: it is firmly based upon 
a thick bed of solid clay, as we said. 
The tall balconies which form a cage 
around it have pillars no less than fifty- 
four feet high, extending from the eaves 
to the ground. Its sides are two hun- 
dred and fifty feet long. Its plan em- 



9° 



"MAY" IN JUNE. 




DRIVE ON THE BEACH. 



braces three sides of a hollow square, 
enclosing a garden. Its situation, on the 
easterly side of the town, is somewhat 
low and boggy, or was when the hotel was 
first laid out, but improvement has rem- 
edied that evil. It accommodates fifteen 
hundred lodgers at once, and, we be- 
lieve, assures every individual of the 
fifteen hundred that his room "has a 
fine view of the ocean." To afford the 
guests of this hotel a grateful drinking- 
water, completely divested of brackish 
impurity, extraordinary pains were taken. 
An artesian well was sunk, and the borer 
did not stop at any cheap success : the 
test-tubes in the hall, to which we have 
alluded, show the extraordinary variety 
of sandy and clayey strata through which 
the drill pursued its progress. At va- 
rious depths veins of water were struck, 
more or less satisfactory, but not until 
the eightieth foot was reached did they 
find that excellent, soft and limpid wa- 
ter with which the guests of the house 
now refiesh themselves. 

Such is the easternmost and right-hand 
house in the picture. Next is seen the 
Columbia House, just in the middle of 
the view, whose frontage is intersected by 
the mast of the little sailing-vessel rep- 
resented by the artist: Mr. Bolton, who 
keeps this favorite old hostelry, is known 
to interior Pennsylvanians through the 



hotel called after his own name in Har- 
risburg. Next to the left, at the corner 
of the street, comes the cubical bulk 
of the Atlantic, a serviceable, free-and- 
hearty house, notable for being open all 
the year round, of which the intelligent 
young proprietor, Mr. McMakin, is made 
the personal friend and confidant of most 
of his guests. To the left of the Atlantic 
is seen the long fa9ade of Congress Hall, 
a house able to entertain two thousand 
guests. Quite at the edge of the picture, 
and the last large structure represented 
this side the lighthouse, is the Sea-Breeze 
Hotel, the great wholesale depot of the 
excursion-parties. Such is the chain of 
first-class houses fronting immediately 
on the sea, to which must be added the 
Ocean House and United States Hotel, 
not clearly made out in the picture, with 
the West End Hotel and a cloud of re- 
spectable select establishments merging 
insensibly into boarding-houses. Over 
the clustered city is seen the white flash 
of Delaware Bay. 

Such a number of important hostelries 
in a row speaks highly for the prosperity 
of Cape May ; and the visitor who takes 
the height of the season may be sure 
that he will find himself at no dull place 
of refuge. The homesick sailor, wear- 
ing round the Jersey point and coming 
close to the shore on a fine evening, as 



'MAY" IN JUNE. 



91 



he passes first Henlopen light and then 
Cape May light on his northward course, 
has this dazzling glimpse of sociability 
and human comradeship to greet him ere 
he bears eastwardly to avoid the land 
under the increasing hazard of the dark: 
what he sees is the flashing lines of 
festal lights from a continuous row of 
monstrous four-floored buildings, seem- 
ing to touch each other, from the Sea- 
Breeze all the way to the Stockton, the 
nightly saturnalia of the first named, 
with crash of drum and blare of horns, 
reaching even out to sea across the roar 
of the surf; the immense lateral extent 
of Congress Hall and the Stockton House 
defined with threads of light like the 
lamps of St. Peter's on Easter evening ; 
the glow of suffused illumination from a 
whole busy city extending over these more 
definite points of brilliancy in a way 
wholly surprising for a lonely, exposed 
cape in the sea ; then, dominating the 
entire group, the dilating and shrinking 
splendor of the lighthouse, a beacon of 
the first order, whose monstrous lan- 
tern intelligently flares up and darkens 
through the minutes of the night. 

Cape Island City — this is, we believe, 
the official name — is an old settlement 



and a permanent centre of business. In 
winter it is a little, frugal, close-girded 
burg of fifteen hundred souls, who go to 
church and pay their taxes, and support 
a couple of papers, and read the news 
about the legislature at Trenton, just like 
any other limited community in a some- 
what lonely retirement : it is not till June 
that they awaken to a sense of the capa- 
bilities of existence, and begin to plan 
for utilizing the summer stranger accord- 
ing to their several professions. Cape 
May is one of those amphibious settle- 
ments, growing from little to more, that 
never seem to have had a beginning. It 
is known to have been a recognized sea- 
bathing resort as far back as the war of 
18 12, from contemporary records of the 
cuttings-up of officers from the hostile 
fleet moored in the bay, who visited the 
place and partook of its amusements, to 
the damage of susceptible hearts lodged 
in the short-waisted gowns of that period. 
Strange old sloops and batteaux used in 
those times to move slowly down the 
Delaware, bearing eager Philadelphians 
on pleasure bent. Other sojourners would 
drive miserably down in their dearborns, 
dragged by tired nags through the inter- 
minable sandy road from Camden. On 




PROMENADE UN THE BEACH. 



•A/AV" IN JUNE. 



the adoption of steam for navigation, a 
modest steamboat was conducted by Mr. 
Wilmon Whilldin, and cut its way down 
the long Delaware in what was deemed 
a fleet and stylish manner, greatly im- 
proving the prosperity of the place. The 
customs of those earlier times were very 
primitive and democratic. Large excur- 





sion-parties of gay girls and festive gen- 
tlemen would journey together, engaging 
the right to occupy Atlantic Hall, a deso- 
late barn of a place, fifty feet square, 
whose proprietor was Mr. Hughes. Then, 
while the straggling villagers stared, these 
cargoes of mischief-makers would bear 
down upon the ocean, ducking and splash- 



ing in old suits of clothes brought in their 
carpet-sacks, and gathering the condi- 
tions of a fine appetite. The major- 
domo of Atlantic Hall, one Mackenzie, 
would send out to see what neighbor had 
a sheep to sell : the animal found, all 
the visitors of the male sex would turn 
to and help him dress it. Meantime, 
parties of foragers 
would go out among 
the farmers around, 
ravaging the neigh- 
borhood for Indian 
corn. When the mut- 
ton was cooked and 
the corn boiled, an 
appetite would have 
accumulated suf- 
ficient to make these 
viands seem like the 
ambrosia of Olympus. 
Those were fine, 
heartsome times, and 
when our predeces- 
sors at Cape May 
went down for a lark, 
they meant it and 
they had it. At night, 
when dead-tired after 
the fiddling and the 
contra - dances, the 
barn - like hall was 
partitioned off into 
two sleeping - rooms 
by a drapery of 
sheets. The maids 
■^^^a slept tranquilly on 

1^^ [ one side the curtain, 

the lads on the other. 
Successive days 
brought other sports 
— fishing in the clum- 
sy boats, rides in hay- 
wagons over the deep 
'• white roads, the end- 

less variety being sup- 
plied, after all, by the bathing, which 
was always the same and ever new. 
These primitive bivouacs were succeed- 
ed by a steady service of steamers on 
the Delaware and the erection of sub- 
stantial and civilized hotels. The long 
boat-ride, beginning at Philadelphia in 
the early morning, and turning out the 



"MAY" IN JUNE. 



93 



sun scorched passengers at the landing 
on the bay about sunset, to be rattled 
along in wild rustic stages to the hotels, 
was a torture of twenty years ago re- 
membered freshly by many a frequenter 
of Cape May. A grand hotel edifice, 
the Mount Vernon, was put up in 1856, 
but soon burned down. The railroad 
was built in 1863, and has now merged 
into the possession of the world-compel- 
ling Pennsylvania Central : it delivers its 
passengers from Philadelphia in about 
three hours. There is now no trouble, 
no fatigue, no vexation about luggage, 
but the languid summer traveler glides 
almost unconsciously from Market street 
wharf directly to the door of the hotel he 
may have chosen. 

But why, after all, do the experienced 
among tourists choose Cape May ? What 
is the attraction which draws such hordes 
of the knowing ones to the utmost ex- 
tremity of the flat, barren plain of New 
Jersey ? Apart from accessibility, the 
reasons are the regular excellence of the 
bathing and the marvelous configuration 
of the beach. The latter is a broad 
natural street, as regular as a ball- 
room floor, packed and beaten by the 
waves into a marble-like solidity : its 
slope being so gentle, it becomes at low 
water a very broad road, along whose 
perfect surface you may drive for miles, 
from the lighthouse at the point to Pov- 
erty Beach, then return and do it all over 
again on a macadam freshly smoothed 
by the rollers since you passed over it 
before. Napoleon and the ancient Latins 
were capital road-builders, but they never 
laid out anything so beautiful as this wide 
and glossy Appian Way, over which 
when you drive you are in fact driving 
upon a polished table of the closest, most 
minute and most regularly laid Roman 
mosaic. The breakers advance, driving 
their long steely blades under the car- 
riage - wheels, and then stream seaward 
again, leaving your road a mirror, in 
which the broken colors of the sunset 
or the passing storm are reflected. To 
ride on good horses along this beach 
with a fair and skillful equestrian, while 
the crescent moon hangs glassed at 
your feet, to be broken by every fall of 



the moon-shaped hoof, and the pouring 
waves murmur eternally of constancy 
and sorrow at your side, and the way 
grows lonelier and lonelier toward the 
utter desolation of Poverty Beach, — is 
an experience not easily matched. The 
sand is unsurpassable, as we have said, 
and for the romantic and the poetical it 
still exists as a stupendous roadway ; but 
in our artificial civilization there is always 
found good reason for replacing the mas- 
terpieces of Nature with the contrivances 
of art. Although a hard beach is in its 
way inviting to the horse, and is excel- 
lent for an equestrian saunter, yet it is 
not good for rapid driving or for crowds. 
Its dampness and peculiar consistency 
exert an influence of suction that is some- 
what tiring to the hoof; and, in fine, the 
penalty of increasing prosperity is that a 
human work must supersede the divine 
one. For this reason the proprietors 
have put up the costly artificial boulevard 
which now extends along the shore, just 
above high-water, for a mile or more in 
front of the most elegant part of the 
town. It is the Chiaja of Cape May — 
the rendezvous of costly equipages and 
staring dandies and well-groomed hack- 
neys. It is what an Englishman would 
call the Ladies' Mile. For exercise on 
this roadway, Allison Naylor, the livery- 
stable keeper from Washington, will fur- 
nish the most dashing teams at the short- 
est notice, with fine horses and liveried 
drivers if required. By his aid the jew- 
eler's clerk, coming down with his year's 
savings, is enabled for a few days to cut 
as great a swell as the real aristocrat, 
and by a judicious expenditure and an 
exertion of that perfect manner which 
always makes an American jeweler seem 
a prince in disguise, may have his day 
with the proudest, and possibly fascinate 
an heiress before the season is over. 

The society of Cape May is based es- 
sentially upon the society of Philadelphia 
and of Baltimore. Before the civil war 
it was the loadstone collecting the finest 
sweepings from the bluest-blooded fam- 
ilies of literally the whole South. Those 
prosperities have succumbed now, except 
in the case of Baltimore, which still re- 
tains its wealth and prestige, and Wash- 



94 



'MAY" IN JUNE. 



ington, whose composite population con- 
tinues to furnish a large accession everv 
summer to the spot. The visits of mil- 
itary organizations (such as the Fifth Ma- 
ryland Regiment, which sturdily camped 
out a thousand strong on the flats near 
the gasworks) are looked to as affording 
the brightest hopes of fun and flirting. 
Among the bands which have made 
night vocal and regulated the dancing 
have been the Annapolis Naval School 
Band, whose good musical training and 
decorous behavior have attracted the 
kindest notice. The musicians employ- 
ed by the hotels are always the best pro- 
curable, under leaders of acknowledged 
merit. Dodsworth's, as we mentioned, 
plays at the Stockton House ; an orches- 
tra of over a dozen pieces, under Simon 
and Mark Hassler, is among the attrac- 
tions of Congress Hall ; Bastert's band 
enlivens the Columbia House ; and there 
is a torrent of music, only too well in- 
tentioned, inspiring the perpetual dances 
at the Excursion House. 

The bath here is of Nature's best. 
The slope of the beach is so gentle and 
so perfectly regular to an indefinite dis- 
tance out under water that it turns up 
the breakers in long even curls with the 
precision almost of machinery. After a 
plunge here, Newport and Atlantic City 
seem tame and millpond-like, while Long 
Branch is too savagely precipitous and 
• comfortless to enter into competition. 
From this circumstance. Cape May is a 
bathing-place where people bathe. The 
habit is a regular one with the frequent- 
ers of all the houses, and the fashionable 
virgins who come with thoughts but of 
lily-white and rouge-vinegar are caught 
by the wholesome infection and adopt 
Nature's cosmetics instead. Coming to 
puff, they remain to bathe. The gentle- 
men assist them at the bath, in the whole- 
some American fashion, in toilettes that 
admit of plenty of dandyism, as those 
of the ladies do of coquetry. 



The sport here is very good. Woodcock 
in summer, curlew and red -head and 
black-head duck, plover, sea-pigeon and 
Canada goose, may be shot abundantly 
in the surrounding country. For fish- 
ing, a boat may be hired at Schelling- 
er's Landing, with every chance of good 
luck at bluefish, called here snapping 
mackerel, and reaching a weight some- 
times of seventeen pounds : a party of 
five caught eighty lately on one bright 
day, trolling for them with a line, a big 
hook and a bait of a glittering spoon as 
the boat dashed fast through the water. 
The " Cape May goody," a delicious salt- 
water fish the size of a perch ; the " spot," 
with its gill marked apparently with a 
wafer ; the blackfish ; the thrumming- 
noised drumfish, inhabitant of the surf, 
and other local prizes, are captured in 
quantities at the Cape. 

Two topics are of too recent a nature 
for consideration in this article. One is 
the lately-projected town of Sea Grove, 
a mile or two west of Cape May City, 
where the invalid may recuperate, or the 
strong enjoy the many opportunities at 
command for recreation from the fatigues 
and trials of business. The ground is 
so situated that sojourners there will en- 
joy sea or bay breeze from whatever 
quarter the wind blows, unless it comes 
from the north-east, a quarter whence 
the wind seldom, if ever, prevails at that 
portion of our coast. There is a hotel 
at Sea Grove, and a large rustic pavilion 
for religious and other meetings. 

The other topic is this summer's yacht- 
race, got up in imitation of the exciting 
one to Five Fathom Bank on the 5th. of 
July, 1871, when the Sappho, owned by 
William P. Douglas, won the Benson cup 
and citizens' prize — Commodore Osgood, 
owner of the next boat, the Columbia, 
gracefully withdrawing his protest on ac- 
count of the Sappho's having shifted her 
ballast without notice forty-eight hours 
before. 



A NEW ATLANTIS, 




THE New Year's debts are paid, the May- 
day moving is over and settled, and still 
a remnant of money is found sticking to the 
bottom of the old marmalade pot. Where 
shall we go ? 

There is nothing like the sea. Shall it be Newport ? 

But Newport is no longer the ocean pure and deep, in the rich severity of its 
sangre azul. We want to admire the waves, and they drag us off to inspect the 
last new villa : we like the beach, and they bid us enjoy the gardens, brought every 
spring in lace-paper out of the florist's shop. We like to stroll on the shore, bare- 

95 



96 



A A'Eir ATLANTIS. 




footed if we choose, and Newport 
is become an affair of toilette and 
gold-mounted harness, a bathing- 
place where people do everything 
but bathe. 

Well, Nahant, then, or Long 
Branch ? 

Too slow and too fast. Besides, 
we have seen them. 

Suppose we try the Isles of 
Shoals ? Appledore and Duck Isl- 
and and White Island, now ? Or 
Nantucket, or Marblehead ? 

Too stony, and nothing in par- 
ticular to eat. You ask for fish, 
and they give you a rock. 

In truth, under that moral and 
physical dyspepsia to which we 
bring ourselves regularly every 
summer, the fine crags of the north 
become just the least bit of a bore. 
They necessitate an amount of 
heroic climbing under the com- 
mand of a sort of romantic and do- 
nothing Girls of the Period, who 
sit about on soft shawls in the lee 
of the rocks, and gather their shells 
and anemones vicariously at the 
expense of your tendon achilles. 
We know it, for we have suffered. 
We calculate, and are prepared to 
prove, that the successful collection 
of a single ribbon of ruffled sea- 
weed, procured in a slimy hay- 
stack of red dulse at the beck of 
one inconsiderate girl, who is keep- 
ing her brass heels dry on a safe 
and sunny ledge of the Purgatory 
at Newport, may require more men- 
tal calculation, involve more an- 
guish of equilibrium, -and encou- 
rage more heartfelt secret profan- 
ity than the making of a steam- 
engine or the writing of a proposal. 

No, no, we would admire noth- 
ing, dare nothing, do nothing, but 
only suck in rosy health at every 
pore, pin our souls out on the holly 
hedge to sweeten, and forget what 
we had for breakfast. Uneasy 
daemons that we are all winter, 
toiling gnomes of the mine and the 
forge — "O spent ones of a work- 
day age" — can we not for one 



A NEW ATLANTIS. 



97 



brief month in our year be 
Turks ? 

Our doctors, slowly acquiring a 
little sense, are changing their 
remedies. Where the cry used to 
be "drugs," it now is "hygiene." 
But hygiene itself might be 
changed for the better. We can 
imagine a few improvements in 
the materia medica of the future. 
Where the physician used to order 
a tonic for a feeble pulse, he will 
simply hold his watch thoughtfully 
for sixty seconds and prescribe 
"Paris." Where he was wont to 
recommend a strong emetic, he 
will in future advise a week's study 
of the works of art at our National 
Capital. For lassitude, a donkey- 
ride up Vesuvius. For color- 
blindness, a course of sunrises from 
the Rigi. For deafness, Wachtel 
in his song of "Di quella Pira." 
For melancolia, Naples. For fe- 
ver, driving an ice-cart. But when 
the doctor's most remunerative 
patient comes along, the pursy 
manufacturer able to afford the 
luxury of a bad liver, let him con- 
sult the knob of his cane a moment 
and order "Atlantic City." 

— Because it is lazy, yet stimu- 
lating. Because it is unspoilt, yet 
luxurious. Because the air there 
is filled with iodine and the sea 
with chloride of sodium. Because, 
with a whole universe of water, 
Atlantic City is dry. Because of 
its perfect rest and its infinite 
horizons. 

But where and what is Atlantic 
City ? It is a refuge thrown up by 
the continent-building sea. Fash- 
ion took a caprice, and shook it 
out of a fold of her flounce. A 
railroad laid a wager to find the 
shortest distance from Penn's 
treaty-elm to the Atlantic Ocean : 
it dashed into the water, and a 
City emerged from its freight-cars 
as a consequence of the manoeu- 
vre. Almost any kind of a parent- 
age will account for Atlantis. It 
is beneath shoddy and above me- 
7 




98 



A NEJV A TLANTIS. 



diocrity. It is below Long Branch and 
higher up than Cape May. It is different 
from any watering-place in the world, yet 
its strong individuality might have been 
planted in any other spot ; and a few 
years ago it was nowhere. Its success 



is due to its having nothing importunate 
about it. It promises endless sea, sky, 
liberty and privacy, and, having made 
you at home, it leaves you to your de- 
vices. 

Two of our best marine painters in 







ST I S 



^r»«.^,nir^— ""^'^^SS HALL 




i s ^ 3 s s .' I ^ ? 4 3 n 



4MMii 





'Wi''«3l^3't"'a''!2'll9'ala|l3W 





CONGRESS HALL. 



their works offer us a choice of coast- 
landscape. Kensett paints the bare stiff 
crags, whitened with salt, standing out 
of his foregrounds like the clean and 
hungry teeth of a wild animal, and look- 
ing hard enough to have worn out the 
painter's brush with their implacable 
enamel. From their treeless waste ex- 
tends the sea, a bath of deep, pure 
color. All seems keen, fresh, beautiful 
and severe : it would take a pair of stout 
New England lungs to breathe enjoy- 
ably in such an air. That is the north- 
ern coast. Mr. William Richards gives 
us the southern — the landscape, in fact, 
of Atlantic City. In his scenes we have 
the infinitude of soft silver beach, the 
rolling tumultuousness of a boundless 
sea, and twisted cedars mounted like 
toiling ships on the crests of undulating 
sand-hills. It is the charm, the dream, 
the power and the peace of the Desert. 



And here let us be indulged with a few 
words about a section of our great con- 
tinent which has never been sung in 
rhyme, and which it is almost a matter 
of course to treat disparagingly. A 
cheap and threadbare popular joke as- 
signs the Delaware River as the eastern 
boundary of the United States of Amer- 
ica, and defines the out landers whose 
homes lie between that current and the 
Atlantic Ocean as foreigners, Iberians, 
and we know not what. Scarcely more 
of an exile was Victor Hugo, sitting on 
the shores of Old Jersey, than is the 
denizen of New Jersey when he brings 
his half-sailor costume and his beach- 
learned manners into contrast with the 
thrift and hardness of the neighboring 
commonwealth. The native of the al- 
luvium is another being from the native 
of the great mineral State. But, by the 
very reason of this difference, there is a 



A NEW A TLANTIS. 



99 



strange soft charm that comes over our 
thoughts of the younger Jersey when we 
have done laughing at it. That broad, 
pale peninsula, built of shells and crys- 
tal-dust, which droops toward the south 



like some vast tropical leaf, and spreads 
its two edges toward the fresh and salt 
waters, enervated with drought and sun- 
shine — that flat leaf of land has charac- 
teristics that are almost Oriental. To 




viiV^'^ ^«s^y ,„.-.-> — ---azL'Pifj 

MR. RICHARD WRIGHT's COTTAGE 



make it the sea heaved up her breast, 
and showed the whitened sides against 
which her tides were beating. To walk 
upon it is in a sense to walk upon the 
bottom of the ocean. Here are strange 
marls, the relics of infinite animal life, 
into which has sunk the lizard or the 
dragon of antiquity — the gigantic Had- 
rosaiirus, who cranes his snaky throat 
at us in the museum, swelling with the 
tale of immemorial times when he wel- 
tered here in the sunny ooze. The coun- 
try is a mighty steppe, but not deprived 
of trees : the ilex clothes it with its set, 
dark foliage, and the endless woods 
of pine, sand-planted, strew over that 
boundless beach a murmur like the sea. 
The edibles it bears are of the quaintest 
and most individual kinds : the cran- 
berry is its native condiment, full of in- 
dividuality, unknown to Europe, beau- 
tiful as a carbuncle, wild as a Tartar 
belle, and rife with a subacid irony that 



lb like the wit of Heine. 

Hei c IS the paiate doia t , 
with evei> kind of swect-fleshcd gourd 
that loves to gad along the sand — the 
citron in its carved net, and the enor- 
mous melon, carnation -colored within 
and dark-green to blackness outside. 
The peaches here are golden-pulped, as 
if trying to be oranges, and are richly 
bitter, with a dark hint of prussic acid, 
fascinating the taste like some enchant- 
ress of Venice, the pursuit of whom is 
made piquant by a fancy that she may 
poison you. The farther you penetrate 
this huge idle peninsula, the more its 
idiosyncrasy is borne in on your mind. 
Infinite horizons, "an everlasting wash 
of air," the wild pure warmth of Arabia, 
and heated jungles of dwarf oaks bal- 
ancing balmy plantations of pine. Then, 
toward the sea, the wiry grasses that 
dry into "salt hay" begin to dispute 
possession with the forests, and finally 
supplant them : the sand is blown into 
coast-hills, whose crests send off into 
every gale a foam of flying dust, and 
which themselves change shape, under 
pressure of the same winds, with a slow- 
er imitation of the waves. Finally, by 



A NE W A TLANTIS. 



the gentlest of transitions, the deserts 
and the quicksands become the ocean. 

The shore melts into the sea by a net- 
work of creeks and inlets, edging the 
territory (as the flying osprey sees it) 
with an inimitable lacework of azure 



waters ; the pattern is one of looping 
channels with oval interstices, and the 
dentellated border of the commonwealth 
resembles that sort of lace which was 
made by arranging on glass the food of 
a silk-spinning worm : the creature ate 




THE SENATE HOUSE 

and wove, havmg voi acity alw1^ b 
befoie him and Fme Ait behind 
him. Much of the solider part 
of the State is made of the materials 
which enter into glass-manufacture : a 
mighty enchanter might fuse the greater 
portion of it into one gigantic goblet. A 
slight approximation to this work of 
magic is already being carried on. The 
tourist who has crossed the lagoons of 
Venice to see the fitful lights flash up 
from the glass-furnaces of Murano, will 
find more than one locality here where 
leaping lights, crowning low banks of 
sand, are preparing the crystal for our 
infant industries in glass, and will re- 
mind him of his hours by the Adriatic. 
Every year bubbles of greater and great- 
er beauty are being blown in these se- 
cluded places, and soon we hope to en- 
rich commerce with all the elegances of 
latticinio and schmelze, the perfected 
glass of an American Venice. 



But our business is not with the land, 
but the sea. Here it lies, basking at 
our feet, the warm amethystine sea of 
the South. It does not boom and thun- 
der, as in the country of the "cold gray 
stones." On the contrary, saturating 
itself with sunny ease, thinning its bulk 
over the shoal flat beach with a succes- 
sion of voluptuous curves, it spreads 
thence in distance with strands and belts 
of varied color, away and away, until 
blind with light it faints on a prodigious- 
ly far horizon. Its falling noises are as 
soft as the sighs of Christabel. Its col- 
ors are the pale and milky colors of the 
opal. But ah ! what an impression of 
boundlessness ! How the silver ribbon 
of beach unrolls for miles and miles ! 
And landward, what a parallel sea of 
marshes, bottoms and dunes ! The 



A NE W A TLANTIS. 



sense of having all the kingdoms of the 
world spread out beneath one, together 
with most of the kingdoms of the mer- 
men, has never so come to one's con- 
sciousness before. And again, what an 
artist is Nature, with these faint washes 
and tenderest varied hues — varied and 
tender as the flames from burning gases 
-rwhile her highest lights (a painter will 
understand the 'difficulty of tJiat) are 
still diaphanous and profound ! 

One goes to the seaside not for pomp 
and peacock's tails, but for saltness. 
Nature and a bite of fresh fish. To build 
a city there that shall not be an insult 
to the sentiment of the place is a matter 
of difficulty. One's ideal, after all, is a 
canvas encampment. A range of solid 
stone villas like those of Newport, so far 
as congruity with a watering-place goes, 
pains the taste like a false note in music. 
Atlantic City pauses halfway between 
the stone house and the tent, and erects 
herself in woodwork. A quantity of 
bright, rather giddy-looking structures, 
with much open-work and carved ruf- 
fling about the eaves and balconies, are 
poised lightly on the sand, following the 
course of the two main avenues which 
lead parallel with the shore, and the 
series of short, straight, direct streets 
which leap across them and run eagerly 
for the sea. They have a low, brooding 
look, and evidently belong to a class of 
sybarites who are not fond of staircases. 
Among them, the great rambling hotel, 
sprawling in its ungainly length here and 
there, looks like one of the ordinary tall 
New York houses that had concluded to 
lie over on its side and grow, rather than 
take the trouble of piling on its stories 
standing. In this encampment of wood- 
en pavilions is lived the peculiar life of 
the place. 

We are sure it is a sincere, natural, 
sensible kind of life, as compared with 
that of other bathing-shores. Although 
there are brass bands at the hotels, and 
hops in the evening, and an unequal 
struggle of macassar oil with salt and 
stubborn locks, yet the artificiality is 
kept at a minimum. People really do 
bathe, really do take walks on the beach 
for the love of the ocean, really do pick 



up shells and throw them away again, 
really do go yachting and crab-catching; 
and if they try city manners in the even- 
ing, they are so tired with their honest 
day's work that it is apt to end in misery. 
On the hotel piazzas you see beauties that 




THE SHINING SANDS. 



surprise you 
with exqui- 
site touches 
of the warm 
and languid 
South. That 
dark Balti- 
more girl, 

her hair a constellation of jessamines, is 
beating her lover's shoulders with her 
fan in a state of ferocity that you would 
give worlds to encounter. That pair of 
proud Philadelphia sisters, statues sculp- 
tured in peach -pulp and wrapped in 
gauze, look somehow like twin Muses at 
the gates of a temple. Whole rows of 
unmatched girls stare at the sea, deso- 
late but implacable, waiting for partners 
equal to them in social position. In such 
a dearth a Philadelphia girl will turn to 
her old music-teacher and flirt solemnly 
with him Tor a whole evening, sooner 
than involve herself with well-looking 
young chits from Providence or New 
York, who may be jewelers' clerks when 
at home. Yet the unspoiled and fruity 
beauty of these Southern belles is very 
striking to one who comes fresh from 
Saratoga and the sort of upholstered 
goddesses who are served to him there. 
Some years ago the Surf House was 



A NEW ATLANTIS. 



the finest place of entertainment, but it 
has now many rivals, taller if not finer. 
Congress Hall, under the management 
of Mr. G. W. Hinkle, is a universal fa- 
vorite, while the Senate House, standing 
under the shadow of the lighthouse, has 
the advantage of being the nearest to the 
beach of all the hotels. Both are am- 
ple and hospitable hostelries, where you 
are led persuasively through the Eleusin- 
ian mystery of the Philadelphia cuisine. 
Schaufler's is an especial resort of our 
German fellow-citizens, who may there be 
seen enjoying themselves in the manner 
depicted by our artist, while concocting — 
as we are warned by M. Henri Kowalski 
— the ambitious schemes which they con- 
ceal under their ordinary enveloppe de- 
bonnaire. 

There is another feature of the place. 
With its rarely fine atmosphere, so tonic 
and bracing, so free from the depress- 
ing fog of the North, it is a great sanita- 
rium. There are seasons when the Penn- 
sylvania University seems to have bred 
its wealth of doctors for the express pur- 
pose of marshaling a dying world to the 
curative shelter of At- 
lantic City. The trains 
are encumbered with the 
halt and the infiim, who 
are got out at the doors 



like unwieldy luggage in the arms of 
nurses and porters. Once arrived, how- 
ever, they display considerable mobility 
in distributing themselves through the 
three or four hundred widely-separated 
cottages which await them for hire. As 
you wander through the lanes of these 
cunning little houses, you catch strange 
fragments of conversation. Gentlemen 
living vis-a-vis, and standing with one 
leg in the grave and the other on their 
own piazzas, are heard on sunny morn- 
ings exciting themselves with the mad- 
dest abuse of each other's doctor. There 
are large boarding-houses, fifty or more 
of them, each of which has its contingent 
of puling valetudinarians. The healthy 
inmates have the privilege of listening 
to the symptoms, set forth with that full 
and conscientious detail not unusual 
with invalids describing their own com- 
plaints. Or the sufferers turn their bat- 
teries on each other. On the verandah 
of a select boarding-house we have seen 
a fat lady of forty lying on a bench like 
a dead harlequin, as she rolled herself 
in the triangles of a glittering afghan. 
On a neighboring seat a gouty subject, 
and a tropical sun pouring on both. 

"Good-morning! You see I am try- 

mg my sun bath I am convinced it 

relieves my spme " The same remark 

has intioduced seven 

morning conversations. 

And my gout has shot 




MR. THOMAS C. HAND'S COTTAGE. 



A NEIV ATLANTIS. 



from the index toe to the ring toe. 
I feared my shpper was damp, and 
I am roasting it here. But, dear 
ma'am, I pity you so with your 
spine ! Tried acupuncture ?" 

The patient probably hears the 
word as Acapulco. For she an- 
swers, " No, but I tried St. Augus- 
tine last winter. Not a morsel of 
good." 

Among these you encounter 
sometimes lovely, frail, transparent 
girls, who come down with cheeks 
of wax, and go home in two months 
with cheeks of apple. Or stout gen- 
tlemen arriving yellow, and going 
back in due time purple. 

Once a hardened siren of many 
watering-places, large and bloom- 
ing, arrived at Atlantic City with 
her latest capture, a stooping in- 
valid gentleman of good family in 
Rhode Island. They boated, they 
had croquet on the beach, they 
paced the shining sands. Both of 
them people of the world and past 
their first youth, they found an 
amusement in each other's know- 
ing ways and conversation that 
kept them mutually faithful in a 
kind of mock-courtship. The gen- 
tleman, however, was evidently 
only amusing himself with this tra- 
vesty of sentiment, though he was 
never led away by the charms of 
younger women. After a month 
of it he succeeded in persuading 
her for the first time to enter the 
water, and there he assisted her 
to take the billows in the gallant 
American fashion. Her intention 
of staying only in the very edge of 
the ocean he overruled by main 
force, playfully drawing her out 
where a breaker washed partially 
over her. As the water touched 
her face she screamed, and raised 
her arm to hide the cheek that had 
been wet. She then ran hastily to 
shore, and her friend, fearing some 
accident, made haste to rejoin her. 
His astonishment was great at find- 
ing one of her cheeks of a ghastly, 
unhealthy white. Her color had 




I04 



A NEW ATLANTIS. 




always been very high. That after- 
noon she sought him and explained. 
She was really an invalid, she said 
calmly, and had recently under- 
gone a shocking operation for tu- 
mor. But she saw no reason for 
letting that interfere with her usual 
summer life, particularly as she felt 
youth and opportunity making away 
from her with terrible strides. Hav- 
ing a chance to enjoy his society 
which might never be repeated, 
fearing lest his rapid disease should 
carry him away from before her 
eyes, she had concluded to make 
the most of time, dissemble her suf- 
fering, and endeavor to conceal by 
art the cold bloodlessness of her 
face. This whimsical, worldly he- 
roism happened to strike the gentle- 
man strangely. He was affected to 
the point of proposing marriage. At 
the same time he perceived with 
some amazement that his disease 
had left him : the curative spell of 
the region had wrought its enchant- 
ment upon his system. They were 
wedded, with roles reversed — he as 
the protector and she as the invalid 
— and were truly happy during the 
eighteen months that the lady lived 
as his wife. 

There are prettier and more inno- 
cent stories. Every freckle-nosed 
girl from the Alleghany valleys who 
sweeps with her polka-muslin the 
floors of these generous hotels has 
an idyl of her own, which she is re- 
hearsing with young Jefferson Jones 
or little Madison Addison. In the 
golden afternoons they ride together 
—not in the fine turn-outs supplied 
by the office-clerks, nor yet on horse- 
back, but in guikless country wa- 
gons guided by Jersey Jehus, where 
close propinquity is a delightful ne- 
cessity. Ten miles of uninterrupted 
beach spread before them, which 
the ocean, transformed for the pur- 
pose into a temporary Haussmann, 
is rolling into a marble boulevard 
for their use twice a day. On the 
hard level the wheels scarcely leave 
a trace. The ride seems like eter- 



A NEW ATLANTIS. 



lO: 



nity, it lapses off so gentle and smooth, I 
and the landscape is so impressively i 
similar : everywhere the plunging surf, • 
the gray sand-hills, the dark cedars with 
foliage sliced off sharp and flat by the 



keen east wind — their stems twisted like 
a dishclout or like the olives around 
Florence. 

Or she goes with Jefferson and Madi- 
son on a "crabbing" hunt. Out in a 




A SCENE IN FRONT OF SCHAUFLER S HOTEL. 



boat at the "Thoroughfare," near the 
railroad bridge, you lean over the side 
and see the dark glassy forms moving 
on the bottom. It is shallow, and a 
short bit of string will reach them. The 
bait is a morsel of raw beefsteak from 
the butcher's, and no hook is necessary. 
They make for the titbit with strange 
monkey-like motions, and nip it with 
their hard skeleton fingers, trying to tuck 
it into their mouths; and so you bring 
them up into blue air, sprawling and 
astonished, but tenacious. You can put 
them through their paces where they 
roost under water, moving the beef 
about, and seeing them sidle and back 
on their aimless, Cousin Feenix - like 
legs : it is a sight to bring a freckle- 
nosed cousin almost into hysterics. But 
one day a vivacious girl had committed 
the offence of boasting too much of her 
skill in crab-catching, besides being quite 
unnecessarily gracious to Mr. Jefferson 



Jones. Then Mr. Madison Addison, 
who must have been reading Plutarch, 
did a sly thing indeed. The boat having 
been drawn unnoted into deeper water, 
a cunning negro boy who was aboard 
contrived to slide down one side without 
remark, and the next trophy of the fem- 
inine chase was a red boiled crab, arti- 
ficially attached to a chocolate caramel, 
and landed with mingled feelings by the 
pretty fisherwoman. Then what a tumult 
of laughter, feigned anger and becom- 
ing blushes ! It is said that that crimson 
shell, carved into a heart-shape of in- 
correct proportions, is worn over Mr. 
Jones's diaphragm to this day. 

At the Inlet, which penetrates the 
beach alongside the lighthouse, is draught 
for light vessels, and the various kinds 
of society which focus at Atlantic City 
may be seen concentrated there on the 
wharf any of these bright warm days. 
A gay party of beauties and aristocrats, 



io6 



A NEW ATLANTIS. 



with a champagne-basket and hamper 
of lunch, are starting thence for a sail 
over to Brigantine Beach. Two gentle- 
men in flannel, with guns, are urging 
a little row-boat up toward the interior 
country. They will return at night laden 
with rail or reed-birds, with the addition- 
al burden perhaps of a great loon, shot 
as a curiosity. Others, provided with 
fishing-tackle, are going out for flounder. 
Laughing farewells, waving handker- 
chiefs and the other telegraphic signs 
of departure, are all very gay, but the 
tune may be changed when the great 
sailing - party comes back, wet and 
wretched, and with three of the principal 
beauties limp as bolsters on the gentle- 
men's hands with sea-sickness. 

Another spirited scene takes place at 
five in the morning — an hour when the 
city beauties are abed with all that 
tenacity of somnolence which character- 
izes Kathleen Mavourneen in the song. 
The husbands and brothers, who are 
due in the city before business hours, are 
out for a good, royal, irresponsible tum- 
ble in the surf. There is the great yeasty 
bath-tub, full of merry dashing figures, 
dipping the sleek shoulder to the comb- 
ing wave. On the shore, active human- 
ities hastily undressing. Then the heav- 
ens are filled with a new glory, and the 
dazzling sun leaves his bath at the same 
time with all these merry roisterers who 
have shared it with him. He takes up 
his line of business for the day, and so 
do the good husbands and brothers, first 
going through a little ceremony of toilet 
from which he is exempt. 

Thus does the New Atlantis provide 
for her republic, holding health to her 
children with one hand, and shaking 
from the other an infinity of toys and 
diversions ; while for those of more 
thoughtful bent the sea turns without 
ceasing its ancient pages, written all over 
with inexhaustible romance. 

The great architect of the city was the 
Power who graded those streets of im- 
maculate sand, and who laid out that 
park of mellow, foam-flowered ocean. 
Its human founders have done what 
seemed suitable in providing shelter for 
a throng of fitful sojourners, not forget- 



ting to put up six neat and modest 
churches, where suitable praise and ad- 
oration may be chanted against the 
chanting of the sea. In several respects 
the place grows somewhat curiously. 
For instance, a lawn of turf is made by 
the simple expedient of fencing off the 
cattle : the grass then grows, but if the 
cows get in they pull up the sod by the 
roots, and the wind in a single season 
excavates a mighty hollow where the 
grassy slope was before. So much for 
building our hopes on sand. An avenue 
of trees is prepared by the easy plan of 
thrusting willow-stems into the ground : 
they sprout directly, and alternate with 
the fine native cedars and hollies in 
clothing the streets with shadow. Sev- 
eral citizens, as Mr. Richard Wright and 
Mr. Thomas C. Hand, whose handsome 
cottages are tasteful specimens of our 
seaside architecture, have been tempted 
by this facility of vegetable life at At- 
lantic City to lay out elaborate gardens, 
which with suitable culture are success- 
ful. Fine avenues of the best construc- 
tion lead off to Shell Beach or to the sin- 
gle hill boasted by the locality. Finally, 
remembering the claims of the great 
democracy to a wash-basin, the asdiles 
invited Tom, Dick and Harry, and set 
up the Excursion or Sea-View House, 
with its broad piazzas, its numberless 
facilities for amusement, and its enor- 
mous dining-hall, which can be changed 
on occasion into a Jardin Mabille, with 
flowers and fountains. 

To a great city all the renovating and 
exhilarating qualities of sea-breezes and 
sea-bathing are but as the waters of 
Tantalus, unless the place which offers 
these advantages be easy of access. In 
this respect Atlantic City has for Phila- 
delphia a superiority over all its rivals. 
The Camden and Atlantic Railroad, to 
whose secretary and treasurer, Mr. D. M. 
Zimmermann, we are indebted for much 
information, has simply drawn a straight 
line to the coast, which may be reached 
in an hour and three-quarters from Vine 
street wharf. The villages on the route, 
like the seaside terminus, owe their ex- 
istence to the road, which is now reaping 
the reward of a far-sighted enterprise. 



10' 



ST. AUCxUSTINE IN 



A SAILOR has just yawned. 
It is seven o'clock of an April 
morning such as does not come any- 
where in the world except at St. Augus- 



APRIL. 



tine or on the Gulf Coast of Florida — a 
morning woven out of some miraculous 
tissue which shows two shimmering as- 
pects, the one stillness, the other glory 




''irniii,:' 

•i'lii;'''''Ji 



! I| 



! Ii'^' I' 



— a morning which mingles infinite re- 
pose with infinite glittering, as if God 
should smile in His sleep. 

On such a morning there is but one 



thing to do in St. Augustine : it is to lie 
thus on the sea-wall, with your legs dang- 
ling down over the green sea-water, laz- 
aretto - fashion ; your arms over your 

107 



io8 



ST. AUGUSTINE IN APRIL. 



head, caryatid-fashion ; and your eyes 
gazing straight up into heaven, lover- 
fashion. 

The sailor's yawn is going to be im- 
mortal : it is reappearing like the Hindoo 



god in ten thousand avatars of echoes. 
The sea-wall is now refashioning it into 
a sea-wall yawn ; the green island over 
across the water there yawns ; now the 
brick pillars of the market -house are 




MARKET- HOUSE. 



yawning ; in turn something in the air 
over beyond the island yawns ; now it 
is this side's time again. Listen ! In the 
long pier there, which runs out into the 
water as if it were a continuation of the 
hotel-piazza, every separate pile is giv- 
ing his own various interpretation of the 
yawn : it runs down them like a fore fin- 
ger down piano -keys, even to the far- 
thest one, whose idea of this yawn seems 
to be that it was a mere whisper. 

The silence here in the last of April 
does not have many sounds, one ob- 
serves, and therefore makes the most 
of any such airy flotsam and jetsam as 
come its way. 

For the visitors — those of them who 
make a noise with dancing of nights and 
with trooping of mornings along the 
Plaza de la Constitucion — are gone ; the 
brood of pleasure-boats are all asleep in 
"the Basin;" practically, the town be- 
longs for twenty-three hours of each day 
to the sixteenth century. The twenty- 
fourth hour, during which the nineteenth 
claims its own, is when the little loco- 
motive whistles out at the depot three- 



quarters of a mile off, the omnibus rolls 
into town with the mail — there are no 
passengers — the people gather at the 
post-office, and everybody falls to read- 
ing the Northern papers. 

Two months ago it was not so. Then 
the actual present took every hour that 
everyday had. The St. Augustine, The 
Florida, The Magnolia — three pleasant 
hotels — with a shoal of smaller public 
and private boarding-houses, were filled 
with people thoroughly alive ; the lovely 
sailing-grounds around the harbor were 
all in a white zigzag with races of the 
yacht club and with more leisurely mazes 
of the pleasure-boat fleet ; one could not 
have lain on the sea-wall on one's back 
without galling disturbance at every mo- 
ment, and as for a yawn, people do not 
yawn in St. Augustine in February. 

There are many persons who have 
found occasion to carp at this sea-wall, 
and to revile the United States govern- 
ment for having gone to the great ex- 
pense involved in its construction, with 
no other result than that of furnishing a 
promenade for lovers. But these are ill- 



ST. AUGUSTINE IN APRIL. 



109 



advised persons : it is easily demonstra- 
ble that this last is one of the most le- 
gitimate functions of government. Was 
not the encouragement of marriage a di- 
rect object of many noted Roman laws? 
And why should not the 
government of the Uni- 
ted States "protect" true 
love as well as pig iron ? 
Viewed purely from the 
standpoint of political 
economy, is not the for- 
mer full as necessary to 
the existence of the state 
as the latter ? 

Whatever may have 
been the motives of the 
Federal authorities in 
buildingit.itsfinalcause, 
causa causans, is certain- 
ly love ; and there is not 
a feature of its construc- 
tion which does not seem 
to have been calculated 
solely with reference to 
some phase of that pas- 
sion. It is just wide 
enough for two to walk 
side by side, with the 
least trifle of pressure 
together ; it is as smooth 
as the course of true love 
is )iot, and yet there are 
certain re-entering angles in it (where the 
stairways come up) at which one is as apt 
to break one's neck as one is to be flirted 
with, and in which, therefore, every man 
ought to perceive a reminder in stone of 
either catastrophe ; it has on one side the 
sea, exhaling suggestions of foam-born 
Venus and fickleness, and on the other 
the land, with the Bay street residences 
wholesomely whispering of settlements 
and housekeeping bills ; it runs at its very 
beginning in front of the United States 
barracks, and so at once flouts War in 
the face, and pursues its course — happy 
omen ! — toward old Fort Marion, where 
strife long ago gave way to quiet warmths 
of sunlight, and where the wheels of the 
cannon have become trellises for peace- 
ful vines; and, finally, it ends — How 
shall a man describe this spot where it 
ends? With but a step the promenader 



passes the drawbridge, the moat, the 
portcullis, edges along the left wall, as- 
cends a few steps, and emerges into the 
olil Barbican. What, then, is the Bar- 
bican ? Nothing : it is an oddly-angled 




SPANISH CATHEDRAL. 

enclosure of gray stone walling round a 
high knoll where some grass and a blue 
flower or two appear. Yet it is Love's 
own trysting-place. It speaks of love, 
love only : the volubility of its quietude 
on this topic is as great as Chaucer has 
described his own : 

Kor he hath told of lovers up and dowrv, 

Moo than Ovide made of mencioun 

In his Epistelles that ben so oldo. 

What schuld I tellen hem, syn they be tolde? 

In youthe he made of Coys and Alcioun, 

And siththe hath he spoke of everych on. 

These noble wyfes, and these lovers eeke. 

Whoso vvole his large volume seeke 

Cleped the seints legendes of Cupide, 

Ther may he see the large woundes wyde 

Of Lucresse, and of Babiloun Tysbee ; 

The sorvve of Dido for the fals Ence ; 

The dree of Philles for hir Demephon ; 

The pleynt of Diane and of Ermyon, 

Of Adrian, and of Ysyphilee; 

The barren yle stondyng in the see ; 

The dreynt Leandere for his fayre Erro ; 

The teeres of Eleyn, and eek the woe 



ST. AUGUSTINE IN APRIL. 



Of Bryxseyde, and of Ledomia ; 
The cruelte of the queen Medea, 
The litel children hanging by the hals 
For thilke Jason, that was of love so fals. 
O Ypermestre, Penollope, and Alceste, 
Youre wyfhood he comendeth with the beste. 
But certaynly no worde writeth he 
Of thilke wikked ensample of Canace, 
That loved her owen brother synfully ! 
On whiche cursed stories I seye fy ! 

Thus the Barbican discourses of true 
love to him who can hear. I am per- 




OLU Cny GATE. 

suaded that Dante and Beatrice, Abelard 
and Heloise, Petrarch and Laura, Lean- 
der and Hero, keep their tender appoint- 
ments here. The Barbican is lovemak- 
ing already made. It is complete Yes, 
done in stone and grass. 

The things which one does in St. Au- 
gustine in P'ebruary become in April the 
things which one placidly hears that one 
ought to do, and lies still on one's back 
on the sea-wall and dangles one's legs. 
There is the pleasant avenue, for in- 
stance, by which the omnibus coming 
from the depot enters the town after 
crossing the bridge over the San Sebas- 
tian River. It runs between the grounds 
of Senator Gilbert on the right (entering 
town), and the lovely orange -groves, 
avenues, cedar - hedges and mulberry 
trees which cluster far back from the 
road about the residences of Dr. Ander- 
son and of Mr. Ball. The latter gentle- 



man is one of the well-known firm of 
Ball, Black & Co. of New York, and has 
built one of the handsomest residences 
in Florida, here on the old " Buckingham 
Smith Place." 

Or there are the quaint courts enclosed 
with jealous high coquina-walls, and giv- 
ing into cool rich gardens where lemons, 
oranges, bananas, Japan plums, figs and 
all manner of tropic flowers and green- 
eries hide from the north-east winds 
and sanctify the old Spanish-built 
homes. One has to be in St. Augus- 
tine some time before one realizes, as 
one passes by these commonplace ex- 
teriors of whitish houses and whitish 
walls, the unsuspected beauties stretch- 
ing back within. 

Then there are the narrow old streets 
to be explored — Bay street, next the 
water ; Charlotte, St. George and To- 
lomato streets running parallel there- 
to ; or the old rookery of a convent, 
where the sisters make lace, looking 
ten times older for the new convent 
that is going up near by ; or the quaint 
cathedral on the Plaza to peep into, 
one of whose bells is said to have 
once hung on the old chapel beyond 
the city gates, where the savages mur- 
dered the priests ; or the Plaza itself 
— Plaza de la Constitucioii — where 
certain good and loyal persons burned 
the effigies of Hancock and Adams some 
hundred years ago ; or the Confederate 
monument on St. George stieet, neai 
Bridge, where one may muse with profit 
in a Centennial year ; or the City Gate, 
looking now more like an invitation to 
enter than a hostile defence as it stands 
peacefully wide open on the grassy banks 
of the canal which formerly let the San 
Sebastian waters into the moat around 
Fort Marion ; or a trip to the hat-braid- 
ers' to see if there is any new fantasy in 
palmetto plaits and grasses ; or an hour's 
turning over of the photographic views 
to fill out one's Florida collection ; or a 
search after a leopard-skin sea- bean. 

Or there is a sail over to the North 
Beach, or to the South Beach, or to the 
high sand-dunes from which Governor 
Oglethorpe once attempted to bombard 
the Spanish governor Monteano out of 



ST. AUGUSTINE IN APRIL. 



the fort ; or to the coquina-quarries and 
the lighthouses on Anastasia Island, the 
larger of which latter is notable as being 
one of the few first-class lighthouses in 
the country. Or there is an expedition 
to Matanzas Inlet, where one can dis- 
embark with a few friends, and have 
three or four days of 
camp-life, plentifully 
garnished with fresh fish 
of one's own catching. 

Or if one is of a scien- 
tific turn one may sail 
down to the Sulphur 
Spring, which boils up 
in the ocean some two 
and a half miles off Ma- 
tanzas. This spring rises 
in water one hundred and 
thirty - two feet deep, 
though that around the 
fountain is only about 
fifty feet ; and its current 
is so strong that the 
steamer of the Coast Sur- 
vey was floated off from 
over the "boil " of it. It 
is intermittent, sometimes 
ceasing to flow, then 
commencing another 
ebullition by sending up 
a cloud of dark-blue sed- 
iment, which can be seen 
advancing to the surface. 
It has been recently ex- 
plored by a Coast Survey party. Such 
a spring is mentioned by Maury in a re- 
port made many years ago to the Navy 
Department. I am informed that a sim- 
ilar one exists in the upper St. John's ; 
and a gentleman told me at Cedar Keys 
that having applied some years ago to a 
sponging vessel out in the Gulf for wa- 
ter, one of the crew took him in a small 
boat to a spot where he dipped up sev- 
eral buckets full of fresh water in the 
midst of the brine. 

Or late in the afternoon one may drive 
out St. George street, through the gate, 
and, passing the Protestant burying- 
ground, ride down a clean road which 
presently debouches on to the beach of 
the San Sebastian and aff"ords a charm- 
ing drive of several miles. Soon after 



getting on this beach one can observe 
running diagonally from the river in a 
double row the remains of an old outer 
line of palisades which connected Fort 
Moosa with a stockade at the San Se- 
bastian. This row runs up and enters 
the grounds of the residence formerly 




ST. GEORGE STREET. 

occupied by George R. Fairbanks, au- 
thor of an excellent history of Florida. 

Or one may visit Fort Marion, that love- 
ly old transformation of the seventeenth 
century into coquina, known in the an- 
cient Spanish days as Fort San Juan and 
as Fort San Marco, and peep into the 
gloomy casemates, the antique chapel, 
the tower, the barbican ; and mayhap the 
fine old sergeant from between his side- 
whiskers will tell of Coacoochee, of Osce- 
ola, and of the skeletons that were found 
chained to the walls of the very dungeon 
in whose cold blackness one is then and 
there shivering. The old sergeant might 
add to his stories that of a white prisoner 
who once dragged out a weary five years 
in these dungeons, and who was a man 
remarkable for having probably tasted 



ST. AUGUSTINE IN APRIL. 



the sweets of revenge in as full measure 
as ever fell to human lot. 1 mean Dan- 
iel McGirth. He was a famous partisan 
scout in the early part of the first Amer- 
ican Revolution, but having been whip- 
ped for disrespect to a superior officer, 




A CAMl' AT MATANZAS. 

escaped, joined the enemy, and there- 
after rained a series of bloody revenges 
upon his injurers. He was afterward 
caught by the Spanish — it is thought 
because he had joined William Augustus 
Bowles in his dreadful instigation of the 
Indians against the Floridian Spaniards 
— and incarcerated in this old fort for 
five years. 

— If indeed the fine old sergeant of 
Fort Marion be still there : it may be 
that he has ceased to be geimts loci since 
the Indians arrived. 

For, alas ! and alas ! the old lonesome 
fort, the sweet old fort, whose pyramids 
of cannon-balls were only like pleasant 
reminders of the beauty of peace, whose 
manifold angles were but warm and 
sunny nooks for lizards and men to 
lounge in and dream in, whose ample 
and ancient moat had converted itself 
with grasses and with tinv flowers into a 



sacred refuge from trade ana care, known 
to many a weary soul, — the dear old fort 
is practically no more : its glories of calm 
and of solitude have departed utterly 
away. The Cheyennes, the Kiowas, the 
Comanches, the Caddoes, and the Arap- 
ahoes, with their 
shuffling chains 
and strange 
tongues and bar- 
baric gestures, 
have frightened 
the timid swal- 
low of Romance 
out of the sweetest 
nest that he ever 
built in America. 

It appears that 
some time about 
the middle of 1874 
the United States 
government an- 
nounced to the 
Indians in North- 
west Texas that 
they must come in 
and give a definite 
account of them- 
selves, whereupon 
a large number 
declared them- 
selves hostile. 
Against these four columns of troops 
were sent out from as many different 
posts, which were managed so vigorous- 
ly that in no long time the great majority 
of the unfriendly Indians either surren- 
dered or were captured. Some of these 
were known to have been guilty of atro- 
cious crimes ; others were men of con- 
sequence in their tribes ; and it was re- 
solved to make a selection of the prin- 
cipal individuals of these two classes, 
and to confine them in old Fort Marion 
at St. Augustine. 

And so here they are — " Medicine Wa- 
ter," a ringleader, along with "White 
Man," "Rising Bull." "Sharp Bully," 
"Hailstone" and others, in the terrible 
murder of the Germain family, and in 
the more terrible fate of the two Germain 
girls who were recently recaptured from 
the Cheyennes; "Come See Him," who 
was in the murder of the Short survey- 



ST. AUGUSTINE IN APRIL. 



113 



ing party; "Soaring Eagle," supposed to 
have killed the hunter Brown near Fort 
Wallace; "Big Moccasin" and "Making 
Medicine," horse -thieves and raiders; 
"Packer," the murderer of Williams; 



"Mochi" the squaw, identified by the 
Germain girls as having chopped the 
head of their murdered mother with an 
axe. Besides these, who constitute most 
of the criminals, are a lot against whom 




OLD SPANISH KOKT SAN MARCO, NOW FORT MARION. 



there is no particular charge, but who are 
confined on the principle that prevention 
is better than cure. "Gray Beard," one 
of this latter class of chiefs, leapt from 
a car-window at Baldwin, Florida, while 
being conveyed to St. Augustine, and 
was shot after a short pursuit by one 
of his guards. "Lean Bear," another, 
stabbed himself and two of his guards, 
apparently in a crazy fit, when near 
Nashville, Tennessee, en route, but has 
since recovered and been sent to join 
those in the fort. One of the Kiowas 
died of pneumonia shortly after arriving 
at St. Augustine, leaving seventy-three, 
including two squaws and a little girl, 
now in confinement. Their quarters are 
in the casemates within the fort, which 
have been fitted up for their use. Dur- 
ing the day they are allowed to move 
about the interior of the fort, and are 
sometimes taken out in squads to bathe : 
at night they are locked up. 

They seem excessively fond of trying 
their skill in drawing, and are delighted 
with a gift of pencil and paper. Already, 
however, the atmosphere of trade has 
reached into their souls : I am told they 
now begin to sell what they were ready 
enough to give away when I saw them 
a ^t\v weeks ago ; and one fancies it will 
S 



not be long before they are transformed 
from real Indians into those vile things, 
watering-place Indians. 

Criminals as they are, stirrers-up of 
trouble as they are, rapidly degenerating 
as they are, no man can see one of these 
stalwart - chested fellows rise and wrap 
his blanket about him with that big ma- 
jestic sweep of arm which does not come 
to any strait-jacketed civilized being, with- 
out a certain melancholy at the bottom 
of his heart as he wonders what might 
have become of these people if so be that 
gentle contact with their white neighbors 
might have been substituted in place 
of the unspeakable maddening wrongs 
which have finally left them but a little 
corner of their continent. Nor can one 
repress a little moralizing as one reflects 
upon the singularity of that fate which 
has finally placed these red-men on the 
veiy spot where red-men's wrongs began 
three centuries and a half ago ; for it was 
here that Ponce de Leon landed in 1512, 
and from the very start there was enmity 
betwixt the Spaniard and the Indian. 

Nor, finally, can one restrain a little 
sipile at the thought that not a hundred 
years ago nearly this same number of 
the most illustrious men in South Caro- 
lina were sent down to this same St. Au- 



114 



ST. AUGUSTINE IN APRIL. 



gustine to be imprisoned for the same 
reason for which most of these Indians 
have been — to wit, that they were men 
of influence and stirrers-up of trouble in 
their tribes. After the capture of Charles- 
ton by the British, during the American 
Revolution, between fifty and sixty of 
the most distinguished South Carolinians 
were rudely seized by order of the Eng- 
lish commander and transferred to St. 
Augustine for safe-keeping, where they 
were held for several months, one of 
their number, Gadsden, being imprison- 
ed for nearly a year in this very old fort, 
refusing to accept the conditions upon 




FORT MARIUN— THE TOWER. 



which the rest were allowed the range 
of the city streets. The names of these 
prisoners are of such honorable antiquity, 
and are so easily recognizable as being 
names still fairly borne and familiarly 
known in South Carolina, that it is worth 
while to reproduce them here out of the 
dry pages of history. They were — John 
Budd, Edward Blake, Joseph Bee, Rich- 
ard Beresford, John Berwick, D. Bor- 
deaux, Robert Cochrane, J. S. Cripps, 
H. V. Crouch, Benjamin Cudworth, Ed- 
ward Darrell, Daniel Dessaussure, John 
Edwards, George Flagg, Thomas Fergu- 
son, General A. C. Gadsden, Wm. Hazel 
Gibbs, Thomas Grinball, William Hall, 
Thomas Hall, George A. Hall, Isaac 
Holmes, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Richard 
Hutson, Noble Wimberly Jones, William 
Johnstone, William Lee, Richard Lush- 
ington, William Logan, Rev. John Lew- 



is, William Massey, Alexander Moultrie, 
Arthur Middleton, Edward McCready, 
John Mouatt, Edward North, John Neuf- 
ville, Joseph Parker, Christopher Peters, 
Benjamin Postell, Samuel Prioleau, Johr 
Ernest Poyas, Edward Rutledge, Hugl 
Rutledge, John Sansom, Thomas Sav 
age, Josiah Smith, Thomas Singleton, 
James Hampden Thompson, John Todd, 
Peter Timothy, Anthony Toomer, Ed- 
ward Weyman, Benjamin Waller, Mor- 
ton Wilkinson and James Wakefield. 

As you stand on the fort, looking sea- 
ward, the estuary penetrating into the 
mainland up to the left is the North 
River, which Rene 
de Laudonniere in 
1 564 called the 
"River of Dol- 
phins;" across it is 
the North Beach ; 
in front you see 
the breakers roll- 
ing in at the har- 
bor-entrance ; the 
stream stretching 
down to the right 
is Matanzas River, 
communicating 
with open water at 
Matanzas Inlet, 
about eighteen 
miles below. An- 
other estuary, the San Sebastian, runs be- 
hind the town, and back into the coun- 
try for a few miles. The bar there is 
said to be not an easy one to cross ; and 
once in, sometimes a nor'-easter springs 
up and keeps you in a week or so. In 
the old times of sailing vessels these 
north-east winds used to be called or- 
ange-winds — on a principle somewhat 
akin to Incus a 11071 — because the out- 
side world could not get any oranges, 
the sailboats laden with that fruit being 
often kept in port by these gales until 
their cargoes were spoiled. In rummag- 
ing over old books of Florida literature 
I came across the record of A Winter in 
the West Indies and Flonda, by An In- 
valid, published by Wiley & Putnam in 
1839, whose account of one of these nor'- 
easters at St. Augustine so irresistibly il- 
lustrates the unreliableness of sick men's 



ST. AUGUSTINE IN APRIL. 



115 



INDIAN ART 



accounts of climates that I cannot help 
extracting a portion of it: "A packet- 
schooner runs regularly from here to 
Charleston, at ten dollars passage, but 
owing to north-east winds it is sometimes 
impossible to get out of the 
harbor for a month at a time. 
1 was detained in that man- 
ner for ten days, during 
which period I wrote this 
description, in a room with- 
out fire, with a cloak on, 
and feet cold in spite of thick 
boots, suffering from asthma, 
fearing worse farther North, 
still burning with impatience 
on account of the delay." 
Such a proem is enough to 
make a St. Augustine per- 
son shiver at the "descrip- 
tion" which is to follow it ; 
and well he might, for my 
Invalid, after giving some 
account of the climate from 
a thermometric record of one year, and 
drawing therefrom the conclusion that 
invalids had better go to St. Augustine 
in the summer than in the winter, pro- 
ceeds : " But the marshes in the vicinity 
harbor too many mosquitoes in summer, 
. . . which rather surprised me, as it 
seemed from the state of the weather in 
April t/iat mosquitoes would freeze in 
summer. These marshes, too, in warm 
weather must produce a bad effect upon 
the atmosphere."* 

"At the time of writing the above," he 
proceeds, " I supposed the wind was com- 
ing about, so as to take me along to some 
place — if no better, at least free from pre- 
tensions to a fine climate. Nothing can 
be worse than to find one's self impris- 
oned in this little village, kept a whole 
week or more with a cold, piercing wind 
drifting the sand along the streets and 
into his eyes, with sometimes a chance 
at a fire morning and evening, and some- 
times a chance to wrap up in a cloak and 
shiver without any, and many times too 
cold to keep warm by walking in the 

* Showing our invalid to be an unmitigated land- 
lubber. The only marsh about St. Augustine is salt- 
water marsh, which is perfectly healthy. It is only 
fresh-water marsh that breeds miasma 



sunshine : with numbers of miserable 
patients hovering about the fire telling 
stories of distress, while others are busi- 
ly engaged in extolling the climate. It 
is altogether unendurable to hear it. 




(DRAWN BY ONE OF THE INDIANS AT ST. 
AUGUSTINE.) 

Why, a man that would not feel too cold 
here would stand a six years' residence 
in Greenland or send an invalid to the 
Great Dismal Swamp for health. The 
truth is, a man in health" — and I am 
sure nothing more naive than this is to 
be found in literature — "can judge no 
better of the fitness of a climate for in- 
valids than a blind man of colors : he 
has no sense by which to judge of it. His 
is the feeling of the well man, but not of 
the sick. I have been healthy, and now 
I am sick, and know the above remark 
is correct. No getting away. Blow, blow, 
blow I North-east winds are sovereigns 
here, forcibly restraining the free-will of 
everybody, and keeping everything at a 
stand-still except the tavern-bill, which 
runs against all winds and weather. Here 
are forty passengers, besides a vessel, de- 
tained for ten days by the persevering 
obstinacy of the tyrant wind, while its 
music roars along the shore to regale us 
by night as well as by day, and keep us 
in constant recollection of the cause of 
detention. 

" Oh for a steamboat, that happiest in- 
vention of man, that goes in spite of wind 
and tide ! Talk of danger ! Why, rather 
than be detained in this manner, I would 



n6 



ST. AUGUSTINE IN APRIL. 



take passage on board a balloon or a thun- 
dercloud. Anything to get along!" 

The city of St. Augustine is built on 
the site of the old Indian town of Seloy 
or Selooe. It was probably a little north 
of this that Ponce de Leon made his first 
landing in Florida in 1512. The tragic 
mutations of the town's early fortunes 




PALMETTO. 

are so numerous that their recital in this 
limited space would be little more than a 
mere list of dates. Instead of so dry a 
skeleton of history, the reader will be at 
once more entertained and more instruct- 
ed in all that is the essence of history by 
this story — thoroughly representative of 
the times — of the brief wars between 
Menendez, the then Spanish governor, or 
" adelantado," of Florida, on the one side, 
and Jean Ribaut and Rene de Laudon- 
niere, French Huguenots, on the other. 
Already, in 1562, Ribaut has touched the 
shore of the St. John's, and then sailed 
northward and planted a short-lived col- 
ony. In 1 564, Laudonniere has come over 
and built Fort Caroline, not far above the 
mouth of the St. John's. Laudonniere 
had previously landed at the present site 
of St. Augustine., and had amicable enter- 



tainment from a "paracoussi," or chief, 
and his attending party of Indians. 
These Frenchmen appear to have had 
much more winning ways with them 
than the Spaniards. Laudonniere de- 
clares that the savages "were sorry for 
nothing but that the night approached 
and made us retire into our ship," and 
that "they endeavored by all means to 
make us tarry with them," desiring "to 
present us with some rare things." 

But presently queer doings begin in 
Fort Caroline, which it is probable was 
situated at St. John's Bluff, on the south 
side of the St. John's River. A soldier 
who professes magic stirs up disaffec- 
tion against their leader. Laudonniere 
manages to send seven or eight of the 
suspected men to France, but while he 
is sick certain others confine him, seize 
a couple of vessels and go off on a pi- 
ratical cruise. Most of them perish after 
indifferent success as freebooters : one 
party returns, thinking that Laudonniere 
will treat the thing as a frolic, and even 
get drunk as they approach the fort, and 
try each other, personating their own 
judges and aping Laudonniere himself. 
But Laudonniere turns the laugh : he 
takes the four ringleaders, shoots them 
first (granting so much grace to their 
soldierships) and hangs them afterward. 

So, Death has his first course in Fort 
Caroline, and it is not long before he is 
in the midst of a brave feast. The gar- 
rison gets into great straits for lack of 
food. One cannot control one's aston- 
ishment that these people, Spaniards as 
well as Frenchmen, should so persistent- 
ly have fallen into a starving condition 
in a land where a man could almost make 
a living by sitting down and wishing for 
it. Perhaps it was not wholly national 
prejudice which prompted the naive re- 
mark of a chronicler in the party of Sir 
John Hawkins, who, with seven English 
vessels, paid Fort Caroline a visit at this 
time, and gave the distressed French- 
men a generous allowance of provisions. 
" The ground," says the chronicler, " doth 
yield victuals sufficient if they would have 
taken pains to get the same; but they" 
(the Frenchmen), "being soldiers, de- 
sired to live by the sweat of other men's 



ST. AUGUSTINE IN A PHIL. 



117 



brows." This chronicler's ideas of hun- 
ger, however, are not wholly reliable : 
hear him discourse of the effect of to- 
bacco upon it : " The Floridians, when 
they travel, have a kind of herbe dried, 
who, with a cane, and earthen cup in 
the end, with fire and the dried herbes 
put together, doe suck throu a cane the 
smoke thereof, which smoke satisfieth 
their hunger, and therewith they live 
four or five days without meat or drinke ; 
and this all the Frenchmen used for this 
purpose, yet doe they hold withal that 
it causes them to reject from their stom- 
achs, and spit out water and phlegm." 

The fate of Fort Caroline rapidly ap- 
proaches. In 1 565, Captain Jean Ribaut 
comes back again from France, with 
workmen and five hundred soldiers, to 
relieve and strengthen the colony on the 
St. John's. Meantime, news gets from 
France to Spain that he is coming ; and 
one Menendez is deputed by the Span- 
ish government to checkmate him. With 
much delay and loss by storms Menen- 
dez ardently pushes on, and makes land 
near St. Augustine harbor within twenty- 
four hours of the arrival of Jean Ribaut 
in the St. John's, fifty miles above. They 
quickly become aware of each other. 
Menendez tries to catch Ribaut's ships, 
but fails, and sails back to St. Augustine ; 
to which, by the way, he has just given 
that name, in honor of the saint's day 
on which he landed. Ribaut in turn re- 
solves to attack, and, sailing down with 
his whole force for that purpose, is driv- 
en southward by a great storm. Mean- 
time, Menendez sets out, under the dis- 
couragements ofa tremendous rain and of 
great difficulty in keeping his people up to 
the mark, to attack Fort Caroline by land. 
No difficult matter to take it, if they only 
knew it, for Menendez has five hundred 
men, and there are in Fort Caroline but 
two hundred and forty souls (Ribaut be- 
ing away with all the available force), 
of whom many are people still seasick, 
workmen, women and children, and one 
is "a player on the virginals." Lau- 
donniere himself, who has been left in 
charge, is sick, though trying his best to 
stimulate his people. 

After three days Menendez arrives at 



dawn. It is but a shout, a rush, a wild 
cry of surprise from the French, a vig- 
orous whacking and thrusting of the 
Spanish, and all is over. A few, Lau- 
donniere among them, escape. Many, 







DATE-PALM. 

including women and children, were kill- 
ed. It was at this time that Menendez 
caused certain prisoners to be hung, with 
the celebrated inscription over them : 
''No por Franceses, sitio por Luteranos." 

Meantime, poor Jean Ribaut has met 
with nothing but disaster. His vessels 
are wrecked a little below Matanzas In- 
let, but his men get ashore, some two 
hundred in one party, and the balance, 
three hundred and fifty, in another. Me- 
nendez hears of the first party through 
some Indians, goes down the main shore, 
and discovers them across the inlet. After 
some conference this Delphic Menendez 
informs them that if they will come over 
he will " do to them what the grace of 
God shall direct." 

Not dreaming that the grace of God 
is going to direct that they be all incon- 
tinently butchered, the poor Frenchmen, 
half dead with terror and hunger, first 
send over their arms, then come over 
themselves, ten at a time, as Menendez 



ii8 



ST. AUGUSTINE IN APRIL. 



directs. And this is the way that the 
grace of Menendez's God directs him to 
treat them, as related by his own broth- 
er-in-law, De Solis : "The adelantado 
then withdrew from the shore about two 
bowshots, behind a hillockof sand, with- 
in a copse of bushes, where the persons 
who came in the boat which brought over 
the French could not see ; and then said 
to the French captain and the other eight 
Frenchmen who were there with him, 
'Gentlemen, I have but few men with 
me, and they are not very effective, and 
you are numerous, and going unrestrain- 
ed it would be an easy thing to take sat- 
isfaction upon our men for those whom 
we destroyed when we took the fort ; 
and thus it is necessary that you should 
march with hands tied behind a distance 
of four leagues from here, where I have 
my camp.' " Very well, say the French- 
men, and so each ten is tied, without any 
other ten seeing it ; "for it was so arranged 
in order that the French who had not 
passed the river should not understand 
what was being done, and might not be 
offended, and thus were tied two hun- 
dred and eight Frenchmen. Of whom 
the adelantado asked that if any among 
them were Catholics they should declare 
it." Eight are Catholics, and are sent off 
to St. Augustine, "and all the rest replied 
that they were of the new religion, and 
held themselves to be very good Chris- 
tians. . . . The adelantado then gave the 
order to march with them ; . . . and he 
directed one of his captains who march- 
ed with his vanguard that at a certain 
distance from there he would observe a 
mark made by a lance, . . . which would 
be in a sandy place that they would be 
obliged to pass in going on their way to- 
ward the fort at St. Augustine, and that 
there the prisoners should all be destroy- 
ed ; and he gave the one in command of 
the rearguard the same ordeY , and ii was 
done accordingly ; when, leaving there 
all of the dead, they returned the same 
night before dawn to the fort at St. Au- 
gustine, although it was already sun- 
down when the men were killed." 

The next day, in much the same way 
and at the same spot, Menendez causes 
a hundred and fifty more Frenchmen to 



be butchered. Among them was their 
commander, Jean Ribaul, who dies like 
a hero, without fear, triumphant. Some 
say Menendez cut off Ribaut's beard and 
sent it to Spain. 

There are still two hundred men of 
Ribaut's, who get down the coast to a 
place they name Canavaral, and set to 
work to build a boat ; but Menendez soon 
captures the party, and thus puts an end 
for the time to the Huguenot coloniza- 
tion in Florida, for Laudonniere's party 
have gone off across the ocean back to 
France. 

But after many months — during which 
Menendez has been very busy building 
up the Indian town of Selooe or Seloy 
into the city of St. Augustine, planting 
garrisons and establishing priests in 
various parts of the country, and final- 
ly going back to Spain for succor — the 
French have their revenge. One Dom- 
inic de Gourgues sets out from France 
in 1567, and after much trial gets into 
the harbor of Fernandina. A favorable 
angel seems to have charge of this man 
from this time on. He is about to be 
resisted by a great crowd of Spaniard- 
hating Indians at Fernandina, when one 
of his men, who had been with Lau- 
donniere, discovers to the Indians that 
they are Frenchmen. Thereupon they 
are hailed with joy, alliance is made 
with Satourioura, a chief with deadly 
feelings toward the Spaniards, and De 
Gourgues soon finds his army increased 
by several thousand good fighters. They 
straightway move down upon the Span- 
ish forts on the St. John's, completely 
surprise them, and kill or capture the 
inmates. With these captives De Gour- 
gues devises that piece of vengeance 
which has become famous in history. 
He leads a lot of them to the same spot 
where Menendez had hung his French- 
men, harangues them first, hangs them 
afterward, and then replaces Menendez's 
tablet with a pine board upon which let- 
ters have been seared with a hot iron, 
setting forth how he does this "not be- 
cause they were Spaniards, not because 
they were castaways, but because they 
were traitors, thieves and murderers." 

Early in 1568, Menendez gets back to 



ST. AUGUSTINE IN APRIL. 



119 



Florida, and one fancies that one would 
not like to have been the body-servant 
of that same adelantado when he learn- 
ed what De Gourgues had done in his 
absence, and how the latter was now 
gone back to France, quite out of his 
reach. Menendez thereupon turns his 
attention toward converting the country 
to his religion, but the inhabitants do not 
seem to appreciate its sublimity. It is 
stated that in one place four priests suc- 
ceeded in baptizing seven people in one 
year, but three of these were dying, and 
the other four were children. The In- 
dians, however, if they refuse Menendez's 
precepts, certainly accept his practice ; 
for one of them, pretending to be con- 
verted, manages to get nine or ten priests 
on a religious errand away up into the 
Chesapeake country, and there does to 
them what the grace of his god directs — 
to wit, plays traitor and gets the whole 
party (except one who is kept captive) 
massacred incontinently. In truth, these 
friars do not seem to have ingratiated 
themselves with the Indians ; and in the 
year 1578 the son of the chief of Guale 
organizes a very bloody crusade against 
them especially. At Tolomato (an In- 
dian suburb of St. Augustine), in the 
night, he kills Father Corpa ; at Topiqui, 
another suburb, he finds Father Rodri- 
guez, yields to the good father's entrea- 
ties that he may say mass before he 
dies, hears him say it, then kills him ; at 
Assapo kills Father Auiion and Father 
Bodazoz ; waylays Father Velacola, who 
is trying to escape from them, and kills 
him ; carries off Father Davila into cap- 
tivity (this Father Davila is twice saved 
from a cruel death during this captivity 
by Indian women) ; and finally gives 
over after being repulsed at the mission 
on San Pedro Island. 

Meantime, in 1586, Sir Francis Drake 
has made a landing at St. Augustine, 
scared everybody away from the fort, 
captured a couple of thousand pounds 
of money in the same, and pillaged and 
burnt the town. Some years later the 
priests got on better, and by the year 
1618 had established twenty missions at 
various points, and began to see some 
fruit springing from their blood and toil. 



About this time they had printed a cat- 
echism in the Timuqua (Tomoka) lan- 
guage, a copy of which was seen by Mr. 
Buckingham Smith some years ago in 
Europe. 

In 1638 the Appalachee Indians attack- 
ed St. Augustine, but were repulsed, with 
the loss of many captives, who were put 
to work on the fortifications, and kept at 
it, with their descendants, for sixty years 
together. The buccaneers, however, were 
more successful, and in 1665 Captain John 
Davis, a pirate, pillaged the town. 

And then followed wars and troubles, 
wars and troubles, until finally the ces- 
sion of the whole of Florida to the United 
States in 1821 gave the people rest from 
that long battledore life during which 
they had been bandied about from king 
to king. 

That portion of the town near the fort 
is known as the Minorcan quarter, and 
is inhabited by persons — mostly sailors 
and fishermen — who are descendants of 
the colonists brought over by Dr. Turn- 
bull to New Smyrna in 1767. These 
colonists were originally introduced to 
engage in the culture of indigo, mainly 
near New Smyrna on the Halifax River, 
some sixty miles south of St. Augustine, 
but after working for eight or nine years 
they disagreed with their employers, 
caused their contracts to be rescinded 
by the courts, and moved up to St. Au- 
gustine, where lands were assigned them. 

The town has a resident population 
of about two thousand, but is swelled 
during the winter by probably six to ten 
thousand visitors. These were formerly 
landed by the St. John's steamboats at 
Picolata, and thence transferred by stage 
to St. Augustine ; but this cumbrous meth- 
od gave way to the demands of the in- 
creasing travel, and a tramway was then 
constructed to Tocoi, a landing on the 
St. John's only fifteen miles distant, over 
which travelers were brought in horse- 
cars. In its turn the tramway has now 
given place to a railway, and a neat little 
locomotive pulls the train across the bar- 
ren pine-flats that lie between St. Augus- 
tine and the river. 

There are here a telegraph-office, post- 



ST. AUGUSTINE nV APRIL. 



office, a public library and reading-room, 
open to strangers, located in the rear 
portion of the post-office building on the 
Plaza ; Catholic, Episcopal, Presbyterian 
and Methodist churches, and a colored 
Baptist church. 

Most consumptives, particularly those 
who have passed the earlier stages of 
the disease, are said to find the air of St. 
Augustine too "strong" in midwinter, 
but to enjoy its climate greatly in April 
and May. There are those, however, 
who have found benefit here during the 
winter ; and it must be said that the needs 
of consumptives vary so much with the 
particular temperament and idiosyncratic 
condition of each patient that no certain 
prophecy, within the limits of climates 
at all suitable for consumptives, can be 
made beforehand. St. Augustine is much 
resorted to by asthmatics : one of these 
has found the North Beach so pleasant 
that he has built a dwelling on it ; and 
the visitor will discover many charming 
residences recently erected in various 
parts of the city by persons from the 
North seeking health. 

Yet why cite precedents to asthma? 
It is a disease which has no law, no rea- 
son, no consisteJicy ; it pulls logic by the 
nose ; it spins calculation round with a 
crazy motion as of a teetotum about to 
fall ; and as for the Medical Faculty, it 
deliberately takes that august personage 
by the beard and beats him with his own 
gold-headed cane. It is as whimsically 
inconsequent as MoUie Sixteen; it is the 
Capriccio in -I time of suffering ; it is 
Disease's loose horse in the pasture. I 
have a friend who begins to wheeze with 
asthma on reaching New York, but re- 
covers immediately on arriving at Phila- 
delphia ; and another who cannot exist in 
Philadelphia, but breathes with compara- 
tive freedom in New York. People are 
known who can live in London, but are 
gasping asthmatics five miles away from 
it ; and their opposites, equally well, who 
gasp in London, but rejoice five miles 
out of town. And I am told that there 
are asthmatics in New York to whom 
Canal street is a perfect demarcation of 
asphyxia, insomuch that they can live 



below it, but would quickly die above it. 
Nor will any one who knows the asthma 
be at all disinclined to believe that their 
contraries might easily be found, who 
would die where these live, and who live 
where these would die. 

The mean temperature of St. Augus- 
tine, calculated upon twenty years' read- 
ing of the thermometer, is — for spring, 
68.54*^ Fahrenheit; for summer, 80.27°; 
for autumn, 7 1. 73°; and for winter, 58.08°. 
This would seem authoritatively to show 
a charming temperature ; and the tem- 
perature is charming, except when the 
north-east wind blows in the winter. This 
is the wind that sets everybody to swear- 
ing at his coffee of a morning, to call- 
ing for his hotel-bill, and to howling in 
right Carlylese at humanity in general. 
It is not severe intrinsically : people here 
always want to kick a thermometer when 
they look at it during a nor'-easter and 
find it only about fifty-five or sixty, where- 
as they had every just ground for expect- 
ing any reasonable thermometer to show 
at least ten degrees below zero. The 
truth is, there is' a sense of imposition 
about this wind which poisons its edge : 
one feels that one has rights, that this 
is Florida, and that the infernal thing 
is the very malignity of pure aerial per- 
secution. It blows as if it had gone out 
of its way to do it, and with a grin. 

Let, however, but a mere twitch of the 
compass happen — let but the east wind 
blow — and straightway the world is ami- 
able again. For here the east wind, of 
such maleficent reputation in the rest 
of the world, redeems all its brethren. 
It is bland as a baby's breath : it is, in- 
deed, the Gulf Stream's baby. And if it 
breathed always as it does on the day of 
this present writing — a sweet and saintly 
wind that is more soothing than a calm 
could be — one finds no difficulty in be- 
lieving that in the course of a i&^ years 
the entire population of the earth, and 
of the heavens above the earth, and of 
the waters beneath the earth, would be 
settled in and around this quaint, ro- 
mantic, straggling, dear and dearer- 
growing city of St. Augustine. 



THE OCKLAWAHA IN MAY. 



FOR a perfect journey God gave us a 
perfect day. The little Ocklawaha 
steamboat Marion — a steamboat which is 
like nothing in the world so much as a 
Pensacola gopher with a preposterously 
exaggerated back — had started from Pi- 
latka some hours before daylight, having 
taken on her pas- ___ 
sengers the night ^ifj^'^jj^V '; ^ 
previous ; and by 
seven o'clock of 
such a May morn- 
ing as no words 
could describe, un- 
less words were 
themselves M a y 
mornings, we had 
made the twenty- 
five miles up the 
St. John's to where 
the Ocklawaha 
flows into that 
stream nearly op- 
posite Welaka. 

Just before en- 
tering the mouth of 
the river our little 
gopher-boat 
scrambled along- 
side a long raft of 
pine logs which 
had been brought 
in separate sections 
down the Ockla 
waha, and took off 
the lumbermen, to 
carry them back 
up the stream for 

another descent, while this raft was be- 
ing towed by a tug to Jacksonville. 

That man who is now stepping from 
the wet logs to the bow-guards of the 
I Marion, how can he ever cut down a 
! tree ? He is a slim, melancholy native, 
and there is not bone enough in his 
I whole body to make the left leg of a good 
i English coal-heaver : moreover, he does 
I not seem to have the least suspicion that 
\ a man needs grooming. He is dishev- 



eled and wry-trussed to the last degree ; 
his poor weasel jaws nearly touch their 
inner sides as they suck at the acrid 
ashes in his dreadful pipe ; and there is 
no single filament of either his hair or 
his beard that does not look sourly and 
at wild angles upon its neighbor filament. 




STARTING-PLACE — PILATKA. 



His eyes are viscidly unquiet; his nose 
is merely dreariness come to a point ; the 
corners of his mouth are pendulous with 
that sort of suffering which involves no 
particular heroism, such as gnats, or 
waiting for the corn-bread to get done, 
or being out of tobacco; and his — But, 
poor devil ! I withdraw all that has been 
said : he has a right to look disheveled 
and sorrowful; for listen: "Well, st'r," 
he says, with a dilute smile as he wearily 

121 



THE OCKLAWAHA IN MAY. 



leans his arm against the low deck and 
settles himself so, though there are a doz- 
en vacant chairs in reach, "ef we didn' 
have ther sentermentalest rain right thar 
on them logs last night, I'll be dad- 
busted!" He had been in it all night. 

I fell to speculating on his word sen- 
termental, wondering by what vague as- 
sociations with the idea of "centre" — 
e. g., a centre - shot, perhaps, as a shot 
which beats all other shots — he had 
arrived at such a form of expletive, or, 
rather, intensive. 

But not long, for presently we rounded 
the raft, abandoned the broad and garish 
highway of the St. John's, and turned 



off to the right into the narrow lane of 
the Ocklawaha, the sweetest wnter-lane 
in the world — a lane which runs for a 
hundred miles of pure delight betwixt 
hedgerows of oaks and cypresses and 
palms and magnolias and mosses and 
manifold vine-growths; a lane clean to 
travel along, for there is never a speck 
of dust in it, save the blue dust and gold 
dust which the wind blows out of the 
flags and the lilies ; a lane which is as if 
a typical woods-ramble had taken shape, 
and as if God had turned into water and 
trees the recollection of some meditative 
stroll through the lonely seclusions of His 
own soul. 




ON THE ST. JOHN S. 



As we advanced up the stream our 
wee craft seemed to emit her steam in 
more leisurely whiffs, as one puffs one's 
cigar in a contemplative walk through 
the forest. Dick, the poleman — a man 
of marvelous fine function when we shall 
presently come to the short narrow curves 
— lay asleep on the guards, in great peril 
of rolling into the river over the three 
inches that intervened between his length 
and the edge ; the people of the boat 
moved not, spoke not; the white crane, 
the curlew, the limpkin, the heron, the 
water-turkey were scarcely disturbed in 
their several avocations as we passed, 
and seemed quickly to persuade them- 



selves after each momentary excitement 
of our gliding by that we were really, 
after all, no monster, but only a mere 
day-dream of a monster. The stream, 
which in its broader stretches reflected 
the sky so perfectly that it seemed a rib- 
bon of heaven bound in lovely doub- 
lings upon the breast of the land, now 
began to narrow : the blue of heaven dis- 
appeared, and the green of the overlean- 
ing trees assumed its place. The lucent 
current lost all semblance of water. It 
was simply a distillation of many-shaded 
foliages, smoothly sweeping along be- 
neath us. It was green trees fluent. One 
felt that a subtle amalgamation and mu- 



THE OCKLAWAHA IN MAY. 



123 



tual give-and-take had been effected be- 
tween the natures of water and of leaves. 
A certain sense of pellucidness seemed 
to breathe coolly out of the woods on 
either side of us, while the glassy dream 
of a forest over which we sailed appear- 
ed to send up exhalations of balms and 
stimulant pungencies and odors. 

"Look at that snake in the water!" 
said a gentleman as we sat on deck with 
the engineer, just come up from his 
watch. 

The engineer smiled. "Sir, it is a 
water-turkey," he said gently. 

The water - turkey is the most prepos- 
terous bird within the range of ornith- 
ology. He is not a bird: he is a Neck, 
with such subordinate rights, members, 
appurtenances and hereditaments there- 
unto appertaining as seem necessary to 
that end. He has just enough stomach 
to arrange nourishment for his Neck, just 
enough wings to fly painfully along with 
his Neck, and just enough legs to keep 
his Neck from dragging on the ground ; 
and as if his Neck were not already pro- 
nounced enough by reason of its size, it 
is further accentuated by the circum- 
stance that it is light-colored, while the 
rest of him is dark. 

When the water - turkey saw us he 
jumped up on a limb and stared. Then 
suddenly he dropped into the water, sank 
like a leaden ball out of sight, and made 
us think he was certainly drowned, when 
presently the tip of his beak appeared, 
then the length of his neck lay along 
the surface of the water, and in this po- 
sition, with his body submerged, he shot 
out his neck, drew it back, wriggled it, 
twisted it, twiddled it, and spirally poked 
it into the east, the west, the north and 
the south with a violence of involution 
and a contortionary energy that made 
one think in the same breath of cork- 
screws and of lightning. 

But what nonsense ! All that labor 
and perilous asphyxiation for a beggar- 
ly sprat or a couple of inches of water- 
snake ! Yet I make no doubt this same 
water-turkey would have thought us as 
absurd as we him if he could have seen 
us taking our breakfast a few minutes 
later. For as we sat there, some half 



dozen men at table in the small cabin, 
all that sombre melancholy which comes 
over the average American citizen at his 
meals descended upon us. No man 
talked after the first two or three feeble 
sparks of conversation had gone out : 
each of us could hear the other crunch- 
ing his bread in faiicibus, and the noise 
thereof seemed to me in the ghastly 
stillness like the noise of earthquakes 
and of crashing worlds. Even our fur- 
tive glances toward each other's plates 
were presently awed down to a sullen 
gazing of each into his own : the silence 
increased, the noises became intolerable, 
a cold sweat broke out over me. I felt 
myself growing insane, and rushed out to 
the deck with a sigh as of one saved from 
a dreadful death by social suffocation. 

There is a certain position a man can 
assume on board the Marion which con- 
stitutes an attitude of perfect rest, and 
leaves one's body in such blessed ease 
that one's soul receives the heavenly in- 
fluences of the voyage absolutely with- 
out physical impediment. Know, there- 
fore, tired friends that shall hereafter 
ride up the Ocklawaha — whose name I 
would fain call Legion — that if you will 
place a chair just in the narrow passage- 
way which runs alongside the cabin, at the 
point where this passage-way descends 
by a step to the open space in front of 
the pilot-house, on the left-hand side as 
you face the bow, you will, as you sit 
down in your chair, perceive a certain 
slope in the railing where it descends by 
a gentle angle of some thirty degrees to 
accommodate itself to the step just men- 
tioned ; and this slope should be in such 
a position that your left leg unconsciously 
stretches itself along the same by the 
pure insinuating solicitations of the fit- 
ness of things, and straightway dreams 
itself off into Elysian tranquillity. You 
should then tip your chair in a slightly 
diagonal direction back to the side of the 
cabin, so that your head will rest there- 
against, your right arm will hang over 
the chair-back, and your left arm will 
repose along the level railing. I might 
go further and arrange your right leg, 
but upon reflection I will give no specific 
instructions for it. because I am disposed 



I 24 



THE OCKLA WAHA IN MA Y. 



to be liberal in this matter, and to leave 
some gracious scope for personal idio- 
syncrasies, as well as a margin of allow- 
ance for the accidents of time and place. 
Dispose, therefore, your right leg as your 
own heart may suggest, or as all the pre- 
cedent forces of time and of the universe 
may have combined to require you. 

Having secured this attitude, open wide 
the eyes of your body and of your soul ; 




CYPRESS SWAMP. 

repulse with heavenly suavity the conver- 
sational advances of the natty drummer 
who fancies he might possibly sell you a 
bill of white goods and notions, as well 
as the far-off inquiries of the real-estate 
person, who has his little private theory 
that you desire to purchase a site for an 
orange grove ; thus sail, sail, sail, through 
the cypresses, through the vines, through 
the May day, through the floating sugges- 
tions of the unutterable that come up. 



that sink down, that waver and sway 
hither and thither: so shall you have 
revelations of rest, and so shall your 
heart for ever afterward interpret Ockla- 
waha to mean repose. 

Some twenty miles from the mouth of 
the Ocklawaha, at the right-hand edge 
of the stream, is the handsomest resi- 
dence in America. It belongs to a cer- 
tain alligator of my acquaintance, a very 
honest and worthy saurian, of good 
repute. A little cove of water, 
dark -green under the overhang- 
ing leaves, placid, pellucid, curves 
round at the river -edge into the 
tiags and lilies with a curve just 
heartbreaking for the pure beauty 
of the flexure of it. This house of 
my saurian is divided into apart- 
ments — little subsidiary bays 
which are scalloped out by the 
lily-pads according to the sinuous 
fantasies of their growth. My/ 
saurian, when he desires to sleep, 
has but to lie down anywhere : he 
will find marvelous mosses for his 
mattress beneath him ; his sheets 
will be white lily-petals ; and the 
green disks of the lily - pads will 
rise above him as he sinks and 
embroider themselves together for 
his coverlet. He never quarrels 
with his cook, he is not the slave 
of a kitchen, and his one house- 
maid, the stream, for ever sweeps 
his chambers clean. His conser- 
vatories there under the glass of 
that water are ever and without 
labor filled with the enchantments 
of strange under-water growths: 
his parks and his pleasure-grounds 
are bigger than any king's. Upon 
my saurian's house the winds have 
no power, the rains are only a new de- 
light to him, and the snows he will never 
see: regarding fire, as he does not em- 
ploy its slavery, so he does not fear its 
tyranny. Thus, all the elements are the 
friends of my saurian's house. While he 
sleeps he is being bathed : what glory to 
awake sweet and clean, sweetened and 
cleaned in the very act of sleep ! Lastly, 
my saurian has unnumbered mansions, 
and can change his dwelling: as no hu- 



THE OCKLA WAHA IN MA V. 



125 



man householder may. It is but a mere 
fillip of his tail, and, lo ! he is establish- 
ed in another palace, as good as the last, 
ready furnished to his liking. 

For many miles together the Ockla- 
waha is, as to its main channel, a river 
without banks, though not less clearly 
defined as a stream for that reason. The 
swift deep current meanders between tall 
lines of forests : beyond these, on both 
sides, there is water also — a thousand 
shallow runlets lapsing past the bases 
of multitudes of trees. Along the im- 
mediate edges of the stream every tree- 
trunk, sapling, stump or other projecting 
coign of vantage is wrapped about with 
a close-growing vine. At first, like an 
unending procession of nuns disposed 
along the aisle of a church these vine- 
figures stand. But presently, as one 
journeys, this nun - imagery fades out 
of one's mind : a thousand other fancies 
float with ever-new vine-shapes into one's 
eyes. One sees repeated all the forms 
one has ever known, in grotesque jux- 
tapositions. Look ! here is a graceful 
troop of girls, with arms wreathed over 
their heads, dancing down into the wa- 
ter ; here are high velvet arm-chairs and 
lovely green fauteuils of divers patterns 
and of softest cushionment ; now the 
vines hang in loops, in pavilions, in col- 
umns, in arches, in caves, in pyramids, in 
women's tresses, in harps and lyres, in 
globular mountain-ranges, in pagodas, 
domes, minarets, machicolated towers, 
dogs, belfries, draperies, fish, dragons ; 
yonder is a bizarre congress — Una on 
her lion, Angelo's Moses, two elephants 
with howdahs, the Laocobn group ; Ar- 
thur and Lancelot with great brands ex- 
tended aloft in combat ; Adam, bent with 
love and grief, leading Eve out of Para- 
dise ; Caesar shrouded in his mantle, re- 
ceiving his stab ; Greek chariots, loco- 
motives, brazen shields and cuirasses, 
columbiads, the twelve apostles, the 
stock exchange : it is a green dance of 
all things and times. 

The edges of the stream are further de- 
fined by flowers and water-leaves. The 
tall blue flags ; the ineffable lilies sitting 
on their round lily-pads like white queens 
on green thrones ; the tiny stars and long 



ribbons of the water-grasses ; the cun- 
ning phalanxes of a species of barnet 
which, from a long stem that swings off 
down stream along the surface, sends up 
a hundred graceful stemlets, each bear- 
ing a shield-like disk, and holding it 
aloft as the antique soldiers held their 
bucklers to form the testudo in attack- 
ing, — all these border the river in infi- 
nite varieties of purfling and chasement. 

The river itself has an errant fantasy 
and takes many shapes. Presently we 
came to where it seemed to branch into 
four separate curves, like two opposed 
S's intersecting at their middle point. 
"Them's the Windin' Blades," said my 
raftsman. 

To look down these lovely vistas is 
like looking down the dreams of some 
young girl's soul ; and the gray moss- 
bearded trees gravely lean over them in 
contemplative attitudes, as if they were 
studying, in the way that wise old poets 
study, the mysteries and sacrednesses 
and tender depths of some visible reverie 
of maidenhood. 

And then after this day of glory came 
a night of glory. Down in these deep- 
shaded lanes it was dark indeed as night 
drew on. The stream, which had been 
all day a ribbon of beauty, sometimes 
blue and sometimes green, now became 
a black band of mystery. But presently 
a brilliant flame flares out overhead : 
they have lighted the pine-knots on top ' 
of the pilot-house. The fire advances 
up these dark sinuosities like a brilliant 
god that for his mere whimsical pleasure 
calls the black chaos into instantaneous 
definite forms as he floats along the river- 
curves. The white columns of the cypress 
trunks, the silver-embroidered crowns of 
the maples, the green and white galaxies 
of the lilies, — these all come in a con- 
tinuous apparition out of the bosom of 
the darkness and retire again : it is end- 
less creation succeeded by endless obliv- 
ion. Startled birds suddenly flutter into 
the light, and after an instant of illumi- 
nated flight melt into the darkness. From 
the perfect silence of these short flights 
one derives a certain sense of awe. The 
mystery of this enormous blackness 
which is on either hand appears to be 



126 



THE OCKLAWAHA IN MAY. 



about to utter herself in these suddenly- 
articulate forms, and then to change her 
mind and die back into mystery again. 

Now there is a mighty crack and crash : 
limbs and leaves scrape and scrub along 
the deck ; a bell tinkles below ; we stop. 



In turning a short curve the boat has run 
her nose smack into the right bank, and 
a projecting stump has thrust itself sheet 
through the starboard side. Out, Dick ! 
out, Henry ! Dick and Henry shuffle for- 
ward to the bow, thrust forth their Ions; 




white pole against a tree-trunk, strain 
and push and bend to the deck as if 
they were salaaming the god of night 
and adversity. The bow slowly rounds 
into the stream, the wheel turns, and we 
puff quietly along. 

Somewhere back yonder in the stern 



Dick is whistling. You should hear 
him ! With the great aperture of his 
mouth and the rounding vibratory sur- 
faces of his thick lips he gets out a mel- 
low breadth of tone that almost entitles 
him to rank as an orchestral instrument. 
Here is what he is whistling: 



THE OCKLAWAHA IN MAY. 



127 



Allegretto. 



D. c. ad iiifinituin. 



^^ 



3= 



^ 



It= 



^^ 



It is a genuine plagal cadence. Observe 
the syncopations marked in this tune : 
they are characteristic of negro music. 
I have heard negroes change a well- 
known air by adroitly syncopating it in 
this way, so as to give it a barbaric effect 
scarcely imaginable ; and nothing illus- 



trates the negro's natural gifts in the way 
of keeping a difficult tempo more clearly 
than his perfect execution of airs thus 
transformed from simple to complex 
times and accentuations. 

Dick has changed his tune : allegro ! 




Da capo, of course, and da capo in- 
definitely ; for it ends on the dominant. 
The dominant is a chord of progress : 
there is no such thing as stopping. It is 
like dividing ten by nine, and carrying 
out the decimal remainders : there is al- 
ways one over. 

Thus the negro shows that he does not 
like the ordinary accentuations nor the 
ordinary cadences of tunes : his ear is 
primitive. If you will follow the course 
of Dick's musical reverie — which he 
now thinks is solely a matter betwixt 
himself and the night as he sits back 
there in the stern alone — presently you 
will hear him sing a whole minor tune 
without once using a semitone : the semi- 
tone is weak, it is a dilution, it is not 
vigorous and large like the whole tone ; 
and I have heard a whole congregation 
of negroes at night, as they were wor- 
shiping in their church with some wild 
song or other, and swaying to and fro 
with the ecstasy and the glory of it, 
abandon as by one consent the semitone 
that should come according to the civil- 
ized modus, and sing in its place a big 
lusty whole tone that would shake any 
man's soul. It is strange to observe that 
some of the most magnificent effects in 
advanced modern music are produced 
by this same method — notably in the 
works of Asger Hamerik of Baltimore 
and of Edward Grieg of Copenhagen. 
Any one who has heard Thomas's or- 
chestra lately will have no difficulty in 
remembering his delight at the beautiful 
Nordische Suite by the former writer and 
the piano concerto by the latter. 



As I sat in the cabin to note down 
Dick's music by the single candle there- 
in, through the door came a slim line of 
dragon-flies, of a small whitish species, 
out of the dark toward the candle-flame, 
and proceeded incontinently to fly into 
the sarrie, to get singed and to fall on the 
table in all varieties of melancholy may- 
hem, crisp-winged, no-legged, blind, aim- 
lessly-fluttering, dead. Now, it so hap- 
pened that as I came down into Florida 
out of the North this spring, I passed 
just such a file of human moths flying 
toward their own hurt ; and I could not 
help moralizing on it, even at the risk of 
voting myself a didactic prig. It was in 
the early April (though even in March I 
should have seen them all the same), and 
the Adam-insects were all running back 
northward — from the St. John's, from 
the Ocklawaha, from St. Augustine, from 
all Florida — moving back, indeed, not 
toward warmth, but toward a cold which 
equally consumes, to such a degree that 
its main effect is called consumption. 
Why should the Florida visitors run back 
into the catarrhal North in the early 
spring ? What could be more unwise ? 
In New York is not even May simul- 
taneously warm water and iced vinegar? 
But in Florida May is May. Then why 
not stay in Florida till May ? 

But they would not. My route was 
by the "Atlantic Coast Line," which 
brings and carries the great mass of the 
Florida pilgrims. When I arrived at 
Baltimore there they were : you could 
tell them infallibly. If they did not have 
slat-boxes with young alligators or green 



128 



THE OCKLAWAHA IN MAY. 



orange-sticks in their hands, you could 
at any rate discover them by the sea- 
beans rattling against the alligators' teeth 
in their pockets: when I got aboard the 
Bay Line steamer which leaves Baltimore 
every afternoon at four o'clock for Ports- 



mouth, the very officers and waiters on 
the steamer were talking alligator and 
Florida visitors. Between Portsmouth 
and Weldon I passed a train - load of 
them : from Weldon to Wilmington, from 
Wilmington to Columbia, from Columbic: 




to Augusta, from Augusta to Savannah, 
from Savannah to Jacksonville, in pas- 
senger-cars, in parlor-cars, in sleeping- 
cars, they thickened as I passed. And 
I wondered how many of them would in 
a little while be crawling about, crippled 
in lung, in liver, in limbs, like these flies. 



And then it was bed-time. 

Let me tell you how to sleep on an 
Ocklawaha steamer in May. With a 
small bribe persuade Jim the steward to 
take the mattress out of your berth and 
lay it slanting just along the railing that 
encloses the lower part of the upper deck, 



THE OCKLAIVAHA IN MAY. 



T29 



to the left of the pilot-house. Then lie 
flat - backed down on the same, draw 
your blanket over you, put your cap on 
your head in consideration of the night- 
air, fold your arms, say some little pray- 
er or other, and fall asleep with a star 
looking right down your eye. 

When you awake in the morning your 
night will not seem any longer, any black- 
er, any less pure, than this perfect white 
blank in the page, and you will feel as 
new as Adam. 

At sunrise, when I awoke, I found 
that we were lying still with the boat's 
nose run up against a sandy bank, which 
quickly rose into a considerable hill. A 
sandy-whiskered native came down from 
the pine-cabin on the knoll. " How air 
ye ?" he sang out to our skipper, with an 
evident expectation in his voice. "Got 
any freight for me ?" 

The skipper handed him a heavy par- 
cel in brown wrapper. He examined it 
keenly with all his eyes, felt it over care- 
fully with all his fingers : his countenance 
fell, and the shadow of a great despair 
came over it. "Look a-here !" he said, 
''hain't you brought me no terbacker ?" 

"Not unless it's in that bundle," said 
the skipper. 

"Hell!" said the native : "/z//'snuth- 
in' but shot ;" and he turned off toward 
the forest, as we shoved away, with a 
face like the face of the apostate Julian 
when the devils were dragging him down 
the pit. 

1 would have let my heart go out in 
sympathy to this man — for the agony of 
his soaked soul after "terbacker" during 
the week that must pass ere the Marion 
come again is not a thing to be laughed 
at — had I not believed that he was one 
of the vanilla-gatherers. You must know 
that in the low grounds of the Ocklawaha 
grows what is called the vanilla-plant, 
and that its leaves are much like those 
of tobacco. This " vanilla" is now ex- 
tensively used to adulterate cheap chew- 
ing tobacco, as I am informed, and the 
natives along the Ocklawaha drive a 
considerable trade in gathering it. The 
process of their commerce is exceedingly 
simple, and the bills drawn against the 
9 



consignments are primitive. The officer 
in charge of the Marion showed me sev- 
eral of the communications received at 
various landings during our journey, ac- 
companying shipments of the spurious 
weed. They were generally about as 
follows : 

" Deer Sir : i send you one bag Ver- 
neller, pleeze fetch one par of shus numb 
8 and ef enny over fetch twelve yards 
hoamspin. Yrs trly, 

The captain of the steamer takes the 
bags to Pilatka, barters the vanilla for 
the articles specified, and distributes them 
on the next trip up to their respective 
owners. 

In a short time we came to the junction 
of Silver Spring Run with the Ocklawaha 
proper. This Run is a river formed by 
the single outflow of the waters of Silver 
Spring, nine miles above. Here new 
astonishments befell. The water of the 
Ocklawaha, which had before seemed 
clear enough, now showed but like a 
muddy stream as it flowed side by side, 
unmixing for a little distance, with this 
Silver Spring water. 

The Marion now left the Ocklawaha 
and turned into the run. How shall one 
speak quietly of this journey over trans- 
parency ? The run is in many places 
very deep : the white bottom is hollowed 
out in a continual succession of large 
spherical holes, whose entire contents 
of darting fish, of under-mosses, of flow- 
ers, of submerged trees, of lily-stems, of 
grass-ribbons, revealed themselves to us 
through the lucid fluid as we sailed along 
thereover. The long series of convex 
bodies of water filling these great con- 
cavities impressed one like a chain of 
globular worlds composed of a trans- 
parent lymph. Great numbers of keen- 
snouted, long-bodied garfish shot to and 
fro in unceasing motion beneath us : it 
seemed as if the under-worlds were filled 
with a multitude of crossing sword-blades 
wielded in tireless thrust and parry by 
invisible arms. 

The shores, too, had changed. They 
now opened into clear savannas, over- 
grown with broad-leafed grass to a per- 



THE OCKLA WAHA IN MA Y. 



feet level two or three feet above the wa- 
ter, stretching back to the boundaries of 
cypress and oak ; and occasionally, as we 
passed one of these expanses curving into 
the forest with a diameter of half a mile, 
a single palmetto might be seen in or near 
the centre — perfect type of that lonesome 



solitude which the German calls Emsam- 
keit — one-some-ness. Then, again, the 
palmettoes and cypresses would swarm 
toward the stream and line its banks. 

Thus for nine miles, counting our gi- 
gantic rosary of water-wonders and lone- 
linesses, we fared on. Then we rounded 




SILVER SPRING. 



to in the very bosom of Silver Spring 
itself, and came to wharf. Here there 
were warehouses, a turpentine distillery, 
men running about with boxes of freight 
and crates of Florida vegetables for the 
Northern market, country stores with 
wondrous assortments of goods — physic, 
fiddles, groceries, school-books, what not 
— and, a little farther up the shore of the 
spring, a tavern. I learned in a hasty 
way that Ocala was five miles distant, 
that I could get a very good conveyance 
from the tavern to that place, and that 
on the next day, Sunday, a stage would 
leave Ocala for Gainesville, some forty 
miles distant, being the third relay of the 
long stage -line which runs three times 
a week between Tampa and Gainesville 
via Brooksville and Ocala. 

Then the claims of scientific fact and 
of guidebook information could hold me 
no longer. I ceased to acquire know- 
ledge, and got me back to the wonder- 
ful spring, drifting over it face downward 
as over a new world. It is sixty feet 



deep a few feet off shore, they say, and 
covers an irregular space of several 
acres ; but this sixty feet does not at all 
represent the actual impression of depth 
which one gets as one looks through the 
superincumbent water down to the bot- 
tom. The distinct sensation is, that al- 
though the bottom down there is clearly 
seen, and although all the objects in it 
are about of their natural size, undimin- 
ished by any narrowing of the visual 
angle, yet it and they are seen from a 
great distance. It is as if Depth itself, 
that subtle abstraction, had been com- 
pressed into a crystal lymph, one inch 
of which would represent miles of ordi- 
nary depth. 

As one rises from gazing into these 
quaint profundities, and glances across 
the broad surface of the spring, one's eye 
is met by a charming mosaic of brilliant 
hues. The water-plain varies in coloi 
according to what it lies upon. Over the 
pure white limestone and shells of the 
bottom it is perfect malachite green ; 



THE OCKLAWAHA IN MAY. 



131 



over the water-grass it is a much dark- 
er green ; over the moss it is that rich 
brown-and-green which Bodmer's forest- 
engravings so vividly suggest ; over neu- 
tral bottoms it reflects the skies' or the 
clouds' colors. All these hues are fur- 
ther varied by mixture with the manifold 
shades of foliage reflections cast from 
overhanging boscage near the shore, 
and still further by the angle of the ob- 
server's eye. One would think that these 
elements of color-variation were numer- 
ous enough, but they were not nearly all. 
Presently the splash of an oar in some 
distant part of the spring sent a succes- 
sion of ripples ciicling over the pool. 



Instantly it broke into a thousandfold 
prism. Every ripple was a long curve 
of variegated sheen : the fundamental 
hues of the pool when at rest were dis- 
tributed into innumerable kaleidoscopic 
flashes and brilliancies; the multitudes 
of fish became multitudes of animated 
gems, and the prismatic lights seemed 
actually to waver and play through their 
translucent bodies, until the whole spring, 
in a great blaze of sunlight, shone like 
an enormous fluid jewel that without de- 
creasing for ever lapsed away upward 
in successive exhalations of dissolving 
sheens and glittering colors. 




THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



VIRGINIA SCENERY. 

IT is a subject of complaint and a 
sore reflection with Virginians that 
the natural scenery of their State, which 
they claim excels in interest any equal 
area of the Union, and surpasses that of 
Europe in the breadth of its panoramas 
and in many other effects, has been so 
long neglected, obtaining hitherto so 
small a patronage of the traveler and 
the artist. Certainly no other State in 
the Union can make the same number 
of exhibitions of the sublime and curious 
in works of the wonder and cunning of 
Nature. Yet these are but little known 
north of the Potomac, and a population 
unskilled in advertising the attractions 
of their neighborhoods sees them ne- 
glected, while inferior scenes and re- 
sorts in the North are attended every 
convenient season by tens of thousands 
of visitors, are displayed in illustrated 
papers, written of, ostentatiously de- 
scribed, and made objects of curiosity 
and of interest to the whole world. The 
writer was recently shown a book, en- 
titled Slimmer Resorts of America, in 
which not a single place attractive to 
travelers for health or pleasure was 
noted south of Cape May. Yet here, 
in this wonderful State of Virginia, we 
have a well-defined belt of territory 
containing more than twenty mineral 
springs, in the variety and efficacy of 
their water certainly unequaled in the 
whole world, and offering the remark- 
able double attraction that these foun- 
tains of health and pleasure are set in a 
scenery unsurpassed, and wherein stand 
numerous wonders of Nature which have 
been sometimes esteemed by the few 
foreign travelers who have penetrated 
to our mountain lands as, indeed, the 
greatest sights of the American con- 
tinent. 

In years before the war these scenes 
were visited from abroad to some ex- 
132 



tent. This awakening interest must 
have been cut short by the war, or for 
some other reason curiosity has resiled 
from the mountains of Virginia, for it 
is certain that scenes among them once 
referred to as wonderful and interesting 
have fallen into comparative obscurity, 
and have for years since the wa.r failed 
to make their appearance even in the 
advertisement columns of the newspa- 
pers. Yet what beauties may be swept 
by a glance of the eye across less than 
half the breadth of the State ! 

Take the Natural Bridge in Rock- 
bridge county, its arch fifty-five feet 
higher than Niagara Falls ; its mystic 
rocks rising with the decision of a 
wall. 

The Peaks of Otter (Bedford county), 
5307 feet above the sea level, where 
John Randolph, once witnessing the 
sun rise over the majestic scene, turned 
to his servant, having no other to whom 
he could express his thoughts, and 
charged him "never from that time to 
believe any one who told him there was 
no God !" 

Hawk's Nest, or Marshall's Pillar 
(Fayette county)— the latter name in 
honor of Chief Justice Marshall, who, 
as one of the State commissioners, stood 
upon its fearful brink, the entire spot 
not affording standing-room for half a 
dozen persons, and sounded its exact 
depth to the river margin, which ex- 
ceeds one thousand feet. 

The Natural Tunnel (Scott county) 
passing one hundred and fifty yards 
through the solid rock, making a huge 
subterraneous cavern or grotto, whose 
vaulted roof rises seventy to eighty feet 
above its floor, and facing the entrance 
to which is an amphitheatre of rude and 
frightful precipices, looking like the de- 
serted thrones of the genii of the moun- 
tain. 
Weyer's Cave (Augusta county ), which 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



^17> 



has been compared to the celebrated 
Grotto of Antiparos, traversing in length 
more than sixteen hundred feet, its in- 
numerable apartments filled with snowy- 
white concretions of a thousand various 
forms, among which stands "The Na- 
tion's Hero," a concretion having the 
form and drapery of a gigantic statue. 

A mountain scenery, of a portion of 
which an English traveler passing 
through the Kanawha country to the 
White Sulphur Springs has written : 
" For one hundred and sixty miles you 
pass through a gallery of pictures most 
exquisite, most varied, most beautiful — 
one that will not suffer in comparison 
with a row along the finest portions of 
the Rhine." 

Again, on the very waters of "the 
Rhine of Virginia" — beautiful, wonder- 
ful New river, cutting with its steel-blue 
blade into the very rock, and even at 
the base of its cliffs passing one hun- 
dred and fifty feet deep through glitter- 
ing banks of the mineral wealth of the 
State. 

The Bald Knob, with nothing but a 
crown of rock on its scarred summit, 
from which we may look as far as eye 
can reach and watch the passenger 
clouds into five States. 

The Salt Pond, the mysterious lake 
hanging among the clouds on the side 
of Bald Knob, unfathomable, or meas- 
ured in places only by the submerged 
forest which we see as if cast in bronze 
in the depths of the emerald waters. 

A little farther away "a new Switzer- 
land," compassed in Tazewell county, 
where "Burke's Garden" smiles in the 
shadow of "the Peak," and the swift 
streams dash like arrows through the 
mountain sides. 

And lastly — that the freshness of a 
recent discovery may adorn the cata- 
logue — the Puncheon Run Falls, dis- 
covered near the Alleghany Springs, 
the water hurled from the brow of the 
mountain, descending at an angle near 
the perpendicular eighteen hundred or 
two thousand feet — a scene in its union 
of the picturesque and grand unexcelled, 
yet which had never been noticed until 
the summer of 1869 but by the rude and 



stoical mountaineers, who had never 
thought of advertising it to the world. 

DISCOVERY BY THE YANKEES. 

A Southern writer has ingeniously 
remarked: "A Northern editor recently 
visited Virginia, and on his return wrote 
just such a descriptive account of the 
people and the country as we should 
expect from an explorer into an un- 
known region. Indeed, one of the most 
noticeable things of the late civil war was 
the discovery of Virginia and the South- 
ern States by the Yankees." 

While capital and immigrants stand 
gazing into this terra incognita, we may 
disclose aspects of it to yet another class 
of adventure and of travel. Fortunately, 
at the time of this writing the attention 
of the country has been powerfully 
drawn toward Virginia in the interest of 
its wonderfid industrial resources and 
of a system of internal improvements 
that has risen to national importance. 
It is reasonable that such a vivid and 
searching regard of the State must, in 
the end, suggest and develop all the 
elements of interest which it contains ; 
that the natural scenery which envelops 
its resources will not be much longer 
slighted by the world ; that the tourist 
will follow in the tracks of adventurers 
in other pursuits, bringing a novel and 
important element of travel into the 
State, and discovering a new world of 
beauty, as well as new kingdoms of 
commerce and industry. 

THE SANITARIUM OF AMERICA. 

What is most remarkable of the Vir- 
ginia springs is their peculiar accommo- 
dation as a summer retreat from those 
vast malarious districts which extend 
through the richest portions of the South 
and lie in the Valley of the Mississippi. 
The fertile regions of the Mississippi are 
liable to fevers (the calentures of the 
Spaniards' times), and will always be 
so : wherever vegetation is prolific and 
exuberant — precisely in the richest por- 
tions of the South — the wealth which 
Nature has bestowed is counterbalanced 



134 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



by chills and fevers. The escape from 
these malarious influences, and from 
the diseases which abound in summer 
along all the tributaries of the Missis- 
sippi, is naturally to the springs and 
mountains of Virginia — that area of high 
land crowned with health-giving waters 
and beautified by the finest natural 
scenery of America. It is when the 
tide of the class of visitors we have de- 
scribed is fully turned into the springs' 
region of Virginia that this portion of the 
State will be developed in its peculiar 
element of prosperity, creating sources 
of wealth as real as those to be found 
in any of the producing industries of the 
commonwealth. The springs of Virginia 
have a future before them that can 
scarcely be measured. It will be real- 
ized when those tides of summer travel 
from the South which were formerly ex- 
tended to tours in the North, and were 
distributed from Saratoga and Cape 
May, are collected, and obtain their 
true direction to the mineral waters and 
mountain scenes of Virginia. The ex- 
tent and peculiarities of the vast popu- 
lations of the South naturally turned to 
these as a summer retreat, the numbers, 
the wealth and munificent habits of a 
class of visitors coming from the richest 
portions of the cotton and sugar regions 
of the South will constitute the future 
prosperity of the springs of Virginia, and 
be the only limits to what are already 
the just expectations of the thoughtful 
and the enterprising. 

The only difficulty will be as to the 
comforts and accommodations of these 
places. This difficulty is already ap- 
parent. The hotel accommodations of 
the springs of Virginia are generally in- 
sufficient or imperfect or unattractive. 
People traveling for health or for pleas- 
ure — especially the latter, persons ac- 
customed to the luxuries of cities — will 
not visit places, however blessed and 
adorned by Nature, where there is 
only a dreary hotel of whitewashed 
boards, and some thin cottages uni- 
formed with wooden washstands, bare 
floors and cheap, crying bedsteads. Nor 
will they be satisfied where the untrav- 
eled proprietor, in his coarse estimate 



of human needs, thinks that only cer- 
tain quantities of food have to be put 
into the stomachs of his guests, in- 
sensible of the truth that the human 
stomach of the civilization outside of 
his mountains needs a delicate chemistry, 
and that the cuisine is really an art — 
not contemptible, as some vulgar satirists 
have supposed, but one belonging to the 
dignity of man. 

But even where the accommodations 
are finer and. irreproachable, the hotel 
establishments of the Virginia springs 
may be said generally to be conducted 
on false and defective principles. They 
are usually conducted on the narrow 
methods of short and exclusive leases ; 
or there is a monopoly of proprietorship 
that excludes from the grounds every- 
thing but its own ideas and fancies. The 
North builds at all its watering-places 
competitive hotels ; it sets up shops and 
competes for every want of its visitors ; 
and the entire hotel system at such 
places is conducted on the principle of 
adaptation to different classes of visitors 
—comfortable accommodations and ne- 
cessaries for all, and luxuries for those 
who wish them and are able to pay for 
them. The hotel establishment of the 
Virginia springs is generally a single 
caravansary, with tmiforviity of accom- 
modations throughout — the narrow, one- 
price system of the single hotel, and its 
stiff rows of cottages as alike as the bar- 
racks of a regiment, even to the pine 
furniture and the huckaback towels. 
The hotel proprietor of the Northern 
watering-place calculates that the man 
who is able and willing to spend his six 
dollars a day shall find occasion for it ; 
while at the same time he does not 
neglect the privileges of another who 
does not want luxuries, who is not able 
to pay for a private parlor or a special 
chamber, and who does not demand a 
degree of accommodation beyond the 
average guest. The hotel proprietor of 
the Virginia springs, on the contrary, 
has but one price and one accommoda- 
tion. There are no degrees of comfort, 
or, what is more, degrees of privacy, 
such as are found in the hotel life of the 
North ; none of its wonderful resources; 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



135 



in short, too much of the old country 
tavern as it existed before the modern 
hotel became one of the phenomena of 
our civilization, an "institution," an em- 
pire and a study. 

The defective hotel establishment 
(generally speaking) of the Virginia 
springs is doubtless a check on the pros- 
perity of these places. Happily, however, 
it is a check that may be readily re- 
moved ; and the present disposition, 
shown at the time of this writing, to im- 
prove and develop springs' property ar- 
gues the commencement of an expan- 
sion of prosperity that will not be the 
least among the great elements of wealth 
in the State. The argument is simply 
this : there is no disposition now among 
the people of the Cotton States to go to 
the Northern cities or watering-places ; 
they greatly prefer the Virginia springs : 
only give f/iew, and advertise to them, 
the acco}>nnodations, and they will come. 
It is said that in the summer of 1869 
there were two thousand visitors at one 
of these springs. There might as well 
have been ten thousand there from the 
great stock of summer custom — persons 
not only from the South, but from every 
part of the Union, who should find at 
these favored spots of Nature the com- 
forts of home and the pleasures of gay 
society, and who would delight to linger 
there for at least four months of the 
year. 

Enterprise and better management 
are yet to be more fully learned by the. 
proprietors of these places. In the les- 
son of the latter is the art of advertising. 
It is the custom of the Virginia springs 
to advertise in a few local papers — the 
lowest appreciation of advertising, a 
system of waste, since it addresses only 
those best calculated to know otherwise 
of subjects in their neighborhood, ne- 
glecting those who are removed from 
sources of information other than comes 
to them by the skill and enterprise of 
the advertiser. Such skill and enter- 
prise are yet to carry a knowledge of the 
springs' region of Virginia beyond the 
contracted borders of special localities 
and to all parts of the country — the 
knowledge that here, accessible to the 



traveler from North, South, East and 
West, is a region more healthful than 
the fabled islands and more beautiful 
than Dreamland — a region where Na- 
ture has intermingled the fountains of 
health with the feasts of the eye — where 
she presses to the lips of the invalid the 
living waters in the garnished and jew- 
eled urns of mountain rock, and spreads 
before the eyes scenes lovelier and 
grander than those which imagination 
with remote and wandering steps pur- 
sues beyond seas and deserts. 

It is a striking knowledge : it cannot 
fail of effects. When the invalids who 
sigh in every corner of the country shall 
know the true value of the mineral 
waters of Virginia ; when the aesthetic 
man of the North, the artist and the 
tourist, shall learn that there is a nat- 
ural scenery in Virginia which in the 
richness and variety of its expressions 
is so admirable, unsurpassed perhaps in 
its whole effects in any equal spaces of 
the world ; when the guide-book of Vir- 
ginia is admitted into the current litera- 
ture of our times as freely and common- 
ly as the pretentious and more intricate 
vade Diecwn of Northern and European 
tours, — we may justly then expect that 
a bulk of travel and of wealth will be 
poured through this region not much 
less than that which has built up Long 
Branches and Saratogas, or that which, 
each summer, crosses the Atlantic to 
dissipate its curiosity and its money in 
foreign lands. The future of the Vir- 
ginia springs is a magnificent specula- 
tion, and there are great prizes bound 
up in it. 

At present I am firmly persuaded 
that there is no field of investment in 
Virginia that presents such opportunities 
as does the already awakened improve- 
ment of springs' property. Nor do I 
regard this matter only in the light of 
benefits to a class of property-holders ; 
nor even exclusively in the interest of 
the numbers resorting to these places 
for health and pleasure. It is a real 
element of public prosperity — part of 
the economy of the resources of Vir- 
ginia and pertaining to the interest of 
the whole commonwealth. The aggre- 



136 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



gate results to the whole State of the 
development of the springs' region is no 
mean consideration. It is an interest 
not only to the philanthropist concerned 
with the ills of humanity, not only to 
men of sentiment and pleasure, but an 
interest to be cultivated in our public 
economy, our legislation, our system of 
internal improvements, our press, our 
literature, and to be shared by all who 
truly and in all respects desire the pros- 
perity of Virginia. 

DISTANCES IN VIRGINIA. 

From the town of Liberty, twenty- 
five miles, on the Virginia and Tennes- 
see Railroad, from Lynchburg, the turn- 
pike to Buchanan leads through a gap 
high up on the side of the mountain, 
and a country road deflects to the sum- 
mit of the Peak. The distance is good 
fourteen miles. And here I may give 
an admonition to the traveler that should 
avail him in all the mountain region of 
Virginia : it is, never to lose time or tem- 
per by asking distances of the country 
people. If he does so, he will be driv- 
en out of his wits by the inconsistencies 
and absurdities of the answers given ; 
and it is not only ignorant people who 
will innocently misinform and annoy 
him, but it is remarkable that the most 
intelligent persons residing in the coun- 
try blunder most unaccountably as to 
distances, and that on roads familiar to 
them. "Just over the mountain" is gen- 
erally ten miles ; and "a piece farther" 
may be half a mile or five miles. When, 
at Liberty, I mounted for the Peak, I 
was told by the nimble barkeeper at the 
hotel that it was ten miles away : the 
fat proprietor, who shuffled in slippers, 
said fifteen. I had ridden a mile out 
of town when I met a wagoner and 
asked the distance to the Peak. " It's 
nigh onto nine mile." I had traveled 
five miles farther, when I accosted a 
man on horseback, " How far to the top 
of the mountain ?" " It is eleven miles," 
he said, solemnly. I was halfway up 
the mountain when I discovered a sleek 
negro at the door of a cabin, to whom I 
repeated the incessant question. "Yes, 



sir" — with an air of importance: then 
throwing up his eyes to the sun as it 
making an astronomical calculatipn — 
"yes, sir : it's just exactly about twenty- 
five miles /" I answered nothing, and 
rode on. I have no commentary to 
make, except the assurance that each 
answer was given me precisely as re- 
corded, and that I have related an actual 
experience. 

THE PEAKS OF OTTER. 

At last I am ascending the mountain 
through a succession of panoramic 
views. The road at one time seems 
going away from the Peak : now it 
bends back with new deteimination ; 
now it flattens out on an observatory, 
where I pause with involuntary excla- 
mations as I see the country below roll- 
ed out, and far beneath me the red 
stripe of road by which I have come. 
It is a wild and desolate country im- 
mediately around me. I ride for miles 
with no sign of human life by the road- 
side but what some hut contains ; some 
dogs bark at the horse's heels ; and 
an old, half-nude negro glares at the 
traveler with savage curiosity, ceasing 
his work in a half-scratched field of 
withered corn. Suddenly, and as if by 
a magical translation, the road that has 
hesitated in such scenes comes out upon 
a broad shoulder of the mountain, in 
sight of a pleasing mansion, and where 
are noticed with infinite surprise all the 
evidences of the broad and garnished 
farm of a wealthy planter. 

A LANDED PROPRIETOR. 

It was indeed a surprising revelation 
to find displayed here something like a 
vision of feudal proprietorship. I had 
got to the "gap" of the Peak before I 
was aware : fenced in by the hills, it 
affords no view of the country below, 
and thus gives no idea of its elevation, 
save by comparison with the yet un- 
sealed top of the mountain ; and I had 
thus insensibly ridden from an almos. 
savage surrounding into a scene of 
broad acres and cultivated rural life. 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



137 



Mr. H , a well-known gentleman of 

Virginia, owns three thousand acres 
here, and has a numerous tenantry. It 
was a picture of the old plantation life 
of Virginia hid away in the niche of a 
mountain — the romantic home of a mod- 
ern feodary suspended in the clouds. 
The hospitality of the proprietor de- 
tained me ; and it was indeed as re- 
freshing as it was unexpected to dis- 
mount at a house which would have 
been of no mean pretensions even 
among our lowland gentry, crossing a 
cultivated lawn to it, and noting evi- 
dences around of a thrifty industry as 
well as a refined taste. The name of 
the place is "Bellevue." But there is 
no view, so concealed is the place in 
the mountain gap, except the Peak, 
which stares into the sky and throws a 
shadow down sharp as a spear-head at 
evening. The neck of land which con- 
stitutes the farm is well cultivated, to- 
bacco being the staple production. 
There were no workmen in the fields ; 
and their absence there was painfully 
explained to me when a few minutes 
later there passed a funeral procession 
of negroes in their decentest attire, fol- 
lowing a short pine coffin placed in a 
rude wagon, that drove slowly to a 
grave dug in the obscure side of the 
mountain that perhaps had bounded all 
that the dead one ever knew of the life 
of this world. 

Mr. H , a representative of the 

best of the intelligent large land-pro- 
prietors of Virginia, instructed and inter- 
ested me greatly in descriptions of the 
resources of the mountain region which 
he so eminently occupied. I found that 
the people were developing a new in- 
dustry here in the raising of fruit, and 
especially in the culture of the grape. 

Mr. H had just sold for fourteen 

hundred dollars the apples he had gath- 
ered from trees scattered about in the 
fields, and hitherto grown without the 
least attention. He was now about to 
make a large experiment in the pro- 
duction of wine from the Joplin grape. 
The description of the country about the 
Peaks of Otter answers, in respect to the 
grape, for nearly the whole length of the 



Blue Ridge in Virginia. On the sunny 
slopes of these mountains there are said 
to be precisely the conditions needed 
for the growing of wine-making grapes. 
The air is dry, the warmth entirely suffi- 
cient, the soil suitable ; so that there 
would be no mildew, the fruit would 
ripen at the proper time, and the crop 
would be abundant. These are the 
conditions indispensable to the produc- 
tion of the juicy wine-grape. The want 
of proper geniality and warmth in the 
climate of the North disables that coun- 
try from producing the wine-grape, while 
it succeeds well in producing the solid 
table-grape. On the other hand, south 
of Virginia there is danger of mildew 
from the dews and fogs. Mildew is the 
great enemy of the grape, and it cannot 
flourish where the causes of the disease 
prevail. On the sunny slopes of the Blue 
Ridge there is no danger of this evil, 
and I was assured that there the wine- 
grape could be produced to perfection, 
and to an extent that would soon make 
a new feature of industry and a new re- 
source of wealth in the State. 



PUNCHEON RUN FALLS. 

Within the leafy and untrodden for- 
est of Montgomery county, in the south- 
western quarter of Virginia, on one of 
the rocky ribs of the Alleghanies, not 
more than eight miles from the famous 
Alleghany Springs, which for years 
have numbered their visitors by the 
thousand from all parts of the Union, a 
gentleman (Dr. Isaac White, the resi- 
dent physician of the springs), rambling 
for trout up one of the forks of the Ro- 
anoke river, found hid in the green 
curtains of the woods, and defended by 
fortress and palisade of rock, what is 
now known as, or rudely called, the 
" Puncheon Run Falls," and what is 
destined (if I can trust my own im- 
pressions) to exceed in its attractions 
those already well-known "sights," 
such as the Natural Bridge,' the Peaks 
of Otter, Weyer's Cave, etc., which have 
made Virginia famous for its monuments 
of the beauty and cunning of Nature. 
In the midst of what must have been 



138 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



once a grand convulsion of the elements, 
and where the mountain side appears 
to have been torn open almost to the 
primitive rock — a wound from an un- 
known source, unhealed, and kept open 
and fretted with huge masses of stone — 
a mountain stream descends, not per- 
pendicularly, nor yet by stages of de- 
scent, but at an angle near the perpen- 
dicular, in a smooth plait of currents, 
knotted with white cas- 
cades, some eighteen hun- 
dred or two thousand feet, 
measuring the length of 
the water. But the scene 
and its surroundings are 
best described from dif- 
ferent stand-points of per- 
sonal observation. The 
journey to secure these 
was not without interest, 
but I have not the space 
here for a record of the 
trip which made for me 
a day of various and in- 
effaceable memories. 

The first expression of 
curious inquiry which is 
made by the visitor at 
Alleghany Springs con- 
cerning this grand and 
even sublime scene, so 
close to a resort thronged 
no less by lovers of Na- 
ture than by those who 
come to drink of the most 
wonderful health -giving 
waters of this State, is, 
that it should have re- 
mained so long undiscov- 
ered, or rather unnoticed, 
to the world. It is won- 
derful, almost ludicrously 
so, that a singular class of 
people, for whom there is no other name 
here but the general one of "Mountain- 
eers," living close to the trails, where 
they scratch the ground for a meagre 
subsistence, and sometimes visiting the 
springs, bringing chickens, eggs, fruit, 
etc., should yet never have mentioned, 
not even signified by a word casually 
dropped in conversation, the existence 
of this wonder of Nature, in the presence 



or within the sound of which they lived 
daily, and some of them had been born. 
There is a "settlement" within a quar- 
ter of a mile of the foot of the Falls, 
and a number of clearings about their 
top. The people who inhabit these 
spaces on the mountains are a singular 
class of country people ; very ignorant, 
of course, but yet possessing much of 
the silence and stoicism of the red man. 




PUNCHEON RUN lALLS. 

They are little disposed to converse, ex- 
cept with those who have the art to fall 
in with their manners — ^jealous or dis- 
dainful of "city folks," and in their un- 
couth life show much more of harsh 
reserve than of mere rustic shyness. 
They are not communicative (except in 
whisky) — of course are desperately ig- 
norant ; but their singular impassiveness 
is what most strikes the traveler. Those 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



139 



who lived near the Puncheon Run Falls 
saw nothing remarkable in them, and 
therefore never spoke of them. Not a 
word, not even an accidental allusion by 
these people, ever discovered that there 
was within eight miles of Alleghany 
Springs what was worth crossing half 
the breadth of this continent to see. 
But for the adventurous steps of an en- 
thusiastic sportsman, the ramparts of 
rocks and the veil of the forest would 
yet have secured against intrusion this 
grand and cunning work of Nature, now 
accessible to the army of tourists and 
the thousands who pursue in all the 
ways of travel the genius of natural 
scenery. 

Speaking to a neighboring mountain- 
eer after his first impression from the 
discovery of these Falls, Doctor White 
moderately remarked that they were a 
great curiosity. 

" I don't see nothing kewrus about 
'em," responded the man, disdainfully. 
"When the water comes over the top it 
is bound to run down to the bottom, 
and der ain't nothing kewrus or com- 
ica/" (a rustic synonym for "strange") 
"in that. Now" — adding, meditatively 
— "if the water was to rjtft up, you see, 
then I allow it would be a kcwrosity" 
— a characteristic expression truly of 
rustic philosophy. 

CAMP OF DESERTERS. 

There are local associations of the 
Falls of a singularly romantic nature, 
which are not to be omitted from my 
narrative, and which appropriately con- 
clude its interest. In the almost inac- 
cessible country near the top of the Falls, 
where there was a more modern settle- 
ment known as Puncheon Camp, there 
are remains of a noted refuge of desert- 
ers in the war of 181 2. There are im- 
perfect walls of stone yet visible where 
they constructed rude abodes and defied 
pursuit. Farther down the side of the 
mountain, perched on a steep slope, 
where a single man might hold in check 
a thousand pursuers, there is an object 
of yet greater interest — a house or cabin 
built of large stones, and so cunningly 



thatched with mosses that to the distant 
eye it has the appearance of one large 
rock on the perilous edge of the preci- 
pice. This singular structure is now 
known as the fortress and abode of a 
number of deserters from the Confed- 
erate army in the late war ; and it is re- 
ported that as many as forty or fifty of 
them harbored here, making predatory 
excursions into the surrounding country 
for subsistence, and invariably escaping 
those who pursued them by the ingenuity 
of their refuge. The place knows them 
no more, but it yet hangs on the moun- 
tain side, its loosened thatches of moss 
fluttering in the breeze, one of the most 
interesting relics of a war whose crook- 
ed paths of romance are yet untrodden 
by historical detail, and are yet to be 
illuminated in story. 

THE MONTGOMERY WHITE SULPHUR. 

It is not so much as an invalid resort 
that these springs are famous ; and the 
proprietors appear to have the good 
sense to understand that, after all, the 
invalid patronage of watering-places is 
but a small proportion of their profits, 
and have therefore determined to keep 
their place in a style of elegance and 
comfort that will afford to that large 
portion of the public in motion in sum- 
mer an attractive resort and a social 
rendezvous. For the gayeties of its sea- 
sons the Montgomery White Sulphur 
has a peculiar and unrivaled reputation 
among the watering-places of Virginia. 
There is nothing of the sapless and un- 
interesting life of an invalid resort. The 
social life here, high as it is, is peculiarly 
Southern; drawing its animation from 
the principal Southern cities, such as 
New Orleans, and having less of that 
Northern shoddyism which it has been 
attempted to import into some of our 
summer resorts in Virginia. Our South- 
ern belles might perhaps improve their 
taste in decoration, but we are sure that 
people of fashion in the North might 
improve their own style by imbibing 
some of that earnest and natural gayety 
and enthusiasm, that unconcealed sense 
of happiness and enjoyment, which cha- 



140 



THE VIRGINIA TO UK I ST. 



racterize the more impulsive and demon- 
strative people of the South in places de- 
signed for pleasure and recreation. 

MOUNTAIN SOCIETY. 

There is a social and literary cultiva- 
tion in this mountainous country which 
often takes the stranger by surprise. 
The hospitality of some .of these homes 
is elegantly dispensed ; some of the finest 
private libraries in Virginia are found 
here ; the daughters of the wealthier 
proprietors are sent to distant cities to 
be educated, and it is not unfrequent to 
find them giving that excellent grace to 
the social circle which we may expect 
from the real refinements of culture 
without the affectations of fashion. But 
what is remarkable of Tazewell and 
of other parts of Virginia, rudely called 
"the mountains," is that with such a de- 
gree of intelligence and refinement as 
that noticed we should find the most 
violent and even grotesque mixture of 
the abjectest ignorance. The contrasts 
in this respect are of the sharpest and 
most painful sort. What may now be 
the scale of popular intelligence in 
Tazewell I do not know, but before the 
common-school system was instituted in 
Virginia, it was estimated that of 3317 
persons in the county over twenty-one 
years of age, 1490 were unable to read 
or write ! 



A RIDE THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS. 

The people who inhabit the wild 
country which breaks into a succession 
of mountain and valley in the south- 
western corner of the State are desig- 
nated generally as "mountaineers." 
They are a peculiar class, with very 
strong marks of character and manners 
upon them. They differ widely from 
the lowland rustic in the freedom of 
their manners, in their superiority to the 
bashfulness and slouching manner of 
the bumpkin of Eastern Virginia, and in 
the energy and even sharpness of their 
discourse. When you ride to the cabin 
of a mountaineer there is no scamper- 
ing of an astonished family, and no un- 



pleasant incident of small, uncombed 
rustics peeping through the intervals of 
brush-heaps or through the cracks of 
fences at the sudden apparition of "the 
stranger ;" no whining, distrustful greet- 
ing of " Mister ;" no feeling on your part 
that "the man in the store clothes" is 
on exhibition in a curious circle of un- 
mannerly wonder. The master of the 
house advances to meet you with a free 
manner : he has not much to say, but 
generally his words are meet and suffi- 
cient : you discover that while he has 
the stoicism, he exhibits the niladmirari, 
the silence, the self-collection of the red 
man of the forest ; and it is only when 
he discovers you to be as unaffected 
and natural as himself that he warms 
into discourse, yet speaking with a 
strange energy, in loud, distinct, decisive 
tones, and with a brevity and senten- 
tiousness that sometimes really rise to 
the dignity of a literary study. 

"Look here," said I, "old man" (a 
term of dignity always appreciated by 
the mountaineer), "why do you smoke 
so much ?" for I had observed him fill- 
ing pipe after pipe, without a moment's 
intermission, in the space of an hour. 
" Well, sir, I live here' — tapping his 
pipe : " I has my pleasure in whatsoever 
I is at for de time I am at it." Could 
there be any more brief or pregnant ex- 
position of the philosophy oicarpe diem ? 

In an intercourse of some days I 
found that the dialect of the Virginia 
mountaineer was not without peculiar- 
ities. If he wishes to explain that he is 
well and in spirits, he is "hunky;" but 
if he wishes to give you a very emphatic 
assurance of his feeling very agreeable, 
he is "hunky-dory." Whatever is not 
sweet and fruitful is "flashy." The 
peaches were "flashy" on account of 
the drouth. But the word of greatest 
pregnancy — that in which the eloquence 
of contempt is boiled down, strained 
and compressed — is "extrornificacious." 
It was explained to me as the deriva- 
tive of a verb meaning to build up and 
to pull down. A worthless busybody, 
a man busy, but with litde results, is 
"extrornificacious ;" and woe to the un- 
happy wight upon whom the weight of 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



141 



this word is laid — to whom this fearful 
adjective once attaches in the critical 
distribution of the mountaineer's opin- 
ions and judgments of men ! 

From the roads running through Taze- 
well county the writer, beinf conveni- 
ently on horseback, turned off several 
times to explore the irregular tracts of 
mountains on the wayside, and to claim 
the hospitality of their singular inhab- 
itants. That hospitality was never once 
denied. Indeed, its abundance was at 
times embarrassing. "Stay all night," 
and the addition, " I'll treat you as well 
as any man," was the unfailing invita- 
tion on our journey. Once, when 1 had 
said, "Good-evening, gentlemen," after 
having mounted my horse, my com- 
panion replied, as we rode away, ''Gen- 
tleine7i indeed ! — for I offered one of 
them a dollar for having pursued and 
caught my horse up the side of the 
mountain, and he actually refused it, as 
if he had been hurt by the offer." 

The county of Tazewell is, as we have 
observed, far away from markets : the 
people sell only those things which 
"walk away" — meaning cattle, horses, 
swine, etc. In midsummer the farmers 
begin to gather their cattle for the 
drovers, who start usually about the 
first of September on their way to the 
Eastern markets. Before the war, this 
county exported, annually, about seven 
thousand head of cattle, and it was not 
unusual to see the roads lined with 
them for miles, many of them passing 
to market through the county from 
Kentucky and Tennessee. The tradi- 
tions of the commerce of Tazewell are 
among the most interesting of South- 
western Virginia, and the modern trav- 
eler gathers from stories of the old 
settlers many curiosities of the early 
history of this part of the State. One 
of the early settlers, yet remembered by 
name (James Witten), had, one day at 
a house-raising, jocosely inquired of his 
comrades what they would think if in 
twenty-five years wagons actually came 
into the county and passed along the 
very valley in which they were at work ? 
"We think," they replied, "you are a 
fool." Yet in less than twenty -five 



years there were roads in Tazewell 
county, and wagons traveled to it from 
cities hundreds of miles away. The 
local historian ( Doctor Bickley ) says : 
" Goods were then wagoned into Taze- 
well from Philadelphia, one wagon-load 
generally sufficing the whole county. 
About the year 1800 a sack of coffee, 
for the first time, was brought into the 
county. It was kept by Mr. Graham, 
the merchant, a year and a half, and 
then sent back as altogether unsalable." 
The mountaineers had not yet learned 
the use of the prime staple of the break- 
fast-table, which is yet an uncommon 
consolation of their poor descendants — 
a consolation which, adulterated at the 
cheap grocery and stirred up with the 
native sugar of the maple, is by no 
means an unmixed one. 

But what is most surprising to the 
modern tourist is the size and value of 
farms (mostly devoted to grazing pur- 
poses) owned by rude men, living in 
smoked log-cabins, whose appearance 
would betoken them as dire, half-nude 
children of poverty. There is many a 
feudal proprietor here in the guise of 
hickory shirt and disproportioned pan- 
taloons. "Uncle Billy" — the avuncular 
title is only one of dignity — owns twelve 
hundred acres, a beautiful domain on a 
broad tableland, probably three thou- 
sand feet above the sea level. There 
is a natural park here of chestnut and 
white pine, some of the trees fifteen to 
twenty feet in girth, fit to be the orna- 
ments of a nobleman's estate : there are 
bursting granaries ; the broad fields are 
picturesque with cattle ; there are store- 
houses of hides, tallow, butter and wool ; 
yet " Uncle Billy" goes in his shirt- 
sleeves, lives in a log-cabin, and having 
taken several drams, villainously sweet- 
ened with maple sugar, on the day we 
alighted at his cabin, whines dismally, 
"Ole Billy is poor, but Ole Billy, you 
know, doctor, is bound to have his 
spree ; and Ole Billy had his jaws slap- 
ped at the saw-mill last night by one of 
the boys ; and Ole Billy cussed him to 
h — 11 and back again ; and Ole Billy 
has a white man's principle," etc., etc. 
But Uncle Billy is happy and contented 



142 



THE VIRGINIA TOUR 1ST. 



in his own way : he raises the finest 
cattle to be found in the Eastern mar- 
kets, and he puts the money in more 
lands, which he farms out on shares to 
the boys — a characteristic of these 
mountaineers being an ambition of ten- 
antry, and an extreme tenacity of land- 
ed property. 

It is painful to notice the seclusion in 
which these mountaineers — even the bet- 
ter class of them — are satisfied to live. It 
is a seclusion which nurtures some vir- 
tues, but which begets a habit of life, a 
slipshod industry, difficult to be under- 
stood in the populous and cultivated old 
Northern States. A mountaineer will 
live in what he esteems comfort, and in 
what he exhibits as contentment, in a 
cabin to which there is no access but a 
hog-path, and cut off by unbridged 
mountain streams, which, swelled by 
freshets, may imprison him for weeks. 
The blacksmith, the harness-maker, the 
wagon-maker, are unknown in his neigh- 
borhood. He will do his work of all 
sorts — cobble harness, work a farm with 
one poor wornout plough, and will have 
about as many tools for five hundred 
acres of land as a live Yankee will re- 
quire for fifty. The loneliness of his 
life never troubles him. Mr. Horace 
Greeley, traveling in another part of 
South-west Virginia (Pulaski county), 
says: "Coming down from the moun- 
tains to Wolf Creek, our party struck 
the clearing of a pioneer who had prob- 
ably lived here fifteen to twenty years, 
had cleared twenty to thirty acres, and 
had most of it in grain ; yet who had no 
outlet but a bridle-path — no sign of cart, 
sled or \Yagon-track — to the road, half a 
mile distant, and perhaps three hundred 
feet below him, through a forest of su- 
perb oak, where a good week's work 
would have made a very passable cart- 
way." This is a picture which we may 
see in almost any mountain hollow of 
South-west Virginia — a bridle-path going 
up dry beds of streams and along preci- 
pices to a mean log-house squat in a 
recess, the master of which, though 



comparatively a man of means, has been 
satisfied for years to plod the same way 
to his dwelling as when he first picked 
his steps through the forest and made a 
clearing for his home. 

Altogether, the mountaineers of Virginia 
are remarkable for a simplicity of primi- 
tive life — a simplicity of some hardy and 
manly aspects, quite unlike that mere 
want of cultivation or that degeneracy 
which, among the opportunities of more 
populous communities, designates the 
lower and ignorant classes. There is 
nothing of the squalor or wretchedness 
of poverty in the mountains. It is the 
native simplicity of the lives of this peo- 
ple that interests us, not the vicious or 
slouching poverty that comes from loss 
of caste or neglect of opportunities in 
other societies. There is nothing in 
common between the poorest moun- 
taineer and the "mudsills" of the low- 
land community. The poverty of the 
mountain is picturesque : it is hardy, 
healthful ; it is a school of rude but in- 
dependent manners, not one of degra- 
dation or of mendicancy, as elsewhere. 
One excellent trait in the life of this peo- 
ple will be testified to by the observant 
traveler. It is the exceeding cleanness 
of even their humblest homes. The ex- 
terior of the log dwelling is uninviting 
enough, but it would be unjust to omit 
the surprised experience of the traveler 
at the neatness and comfort he finds 
across the rough-hewn threshold. The 
few articles of furniture are well ar- 
ranged. The bed, which is always 
found in the main room where strangers 
are received, is almost uniformly spread 
with a coverlet of snowy white, forming 
a contrast to the dingy log walls and 
rough floor of boards or puncheons. 
The dress of the inmates, though often 
scanty, is clean homespun. Their ap- 
pearance is healthful : the men gaunt, 
muscular, remarkable for the want of 
color in the face, but having nothing of 
the sallowness of a sickly or ill-con- 
ditioned people. 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 
II. 



THE NATURAL TUNNEL. 

THE writer opines that many per- 
sons living beyond the limits of 
Virginia (and he knows that even a 
considerable number of natives of this 
grand and wonderful State) have never 
heard of the Natural Tunnel. Whether 
or not it is one of the greatest wonders 
of this continent, let the reader deter- 
mine when he has read my description, 
rude and insufficient as it may be. 
Much has been written vaguely (and 
my own pen is already dipped in the 
subject) of the natural scenery of Vir- 
ginia, its supreme claims on the Ameri- 
can tourist, and the neglect of those 
claims ; but it is certainly an extraordi- 
nary instance of such neglect that there 
is within my memory no printed ac- 
count of the Natural Tunnel, and that 
even the curiosity of the newspaper-man 
has scarcely penetrated its obscurity. 

The road to Estillville takes us, in 
turns, through two States. It is the great 
thoroughfare of the wagon-trade to Bris- 
tol, and it is picturesque with white- 
covered wagons winding over the hills, 
separate or in trains, dotting the land- 
scape, several of them being almost 
constantly visible on the tract of coun- 
try that the eye sweeps. These are tlie 
white ships of the mountains. They are 
freighted with grain and fruit, and the 
other stores necessary in the distant 
homes from which they have come. 
Some of them are emigrant trains 
traveling westward. The modes of 
"moving" are interesting. Whole fam- 
ilies live for days, and even weeks, in 
the covered bodies of these wagons, 
cooking and sleeping under the trees 
by the wayside ; and as the heavy ve- 
hicle lumbers on in the day, such of the 
emigrants as are able to walk trudge by 
the side of it, while the aged and feeble 
ride ; and it is not uncommon to see the 
curious eyes of little children, in various 



begrimed conditions, peeping from the 
white canvas that covers the moving 
household. 

In one passage of the road we met a 
close train of five covered wagons — a 
few men in front with rifles on their 
shoulders, and some six or seven bare- 
foot women in their rear, of all ages, 
from the old crone in her narrow and 
dirty dress of linsey-woolsey to the 
young girl of mountain beauty unadorn- 
ed, walking slowly and painfully over 
the stones as their teams labored up the 
hill. 

"Where are you going?" we asked 
of one of the men. 

"Gwine to Ar-kan-^v?.?," was the re- 
ply, with a strong accent on the last 
syllable. 

"You have a long journey before you, 
my friend." 

"Yes, furrer'n five hundred miles, I 
reckon," was the answer, with a certain 
air of determination in the bronzed, set 
face; and slowly, sturdily, the train 
moved on in that long and weary jour- 
ney which poverty and disappointment 
elsewhere had appointed for the emi- 
grants. 

The western face of the Tunnel, near 
which we dismount, continues partly 
concealed from view, or is imperfectly 
exposed, until we nearly approach it, 
the immense rock which is perforated 
being here dressed with the thick foliage 
of the spruce-pine, and the harsh sur- 
f;xce adorned with a beautiful tracery of 
vines and creepers. At last is seen the 
entrance of what appears to be a huge 
subterraneous cavern or grotto, into 
which the stream disappears ; a tower- 
ing rock rising here about two hundred 
feet above the surface of the stream, 
and a rude entrance gouged into it, 
varying in width, as far as the eye can 
reach, from one hundred to one hun- 
dred and fifty feet, and rising in a clear 

143 



144 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



vault from seventy to eighty feet above 
the floor. The view here terminates in 
the very blackness of darkness : it is 
broken on the first curve of the Tunnel. 
The bed of the stream, from which the 
water has disappeared on account of 
the drought, the reduced currents sinking 
to lower subterranean channels, is piled 
with great irregular rocks, on the sharp 
points of which we stumble and cut our 
hands : there is no foothold but on 

.if 




THE NATURAL TUNNEL — ITS INTERIOR 

rocks ; and it is only when we have 
struggled through the awful, cruel dark- 
ness, holding up some feeble lights in 
it, and issued into the broad sunshine, 
that we find we have traveled nearly two 
hundred yards (or say, more exactly, five 
hundred feet) through one solid rock, 
in which there is not an inch of soil, not 
a seam, not a cleft, and which, even 
beyond the debouchure of the Tunnel, 
vet runs away a hundred yards in a 



wall five hundred feet high, as clean 
and whetted as the work of the mason. 
But we must not anticipate this ma- 
jestical scene, "wonderful beyond all 
wondrous measure." Happily, in en- 
tering the Tunnel from the western side, 
we have adopted the course of explora- 
tion which affords a gradual ascent of 
the emotions, until at last they tower 
to the standard of a perfect sublimity. 
The course of the Tunnel may be de- 
scribed as a continu- 
ous curve : it resem- 
bles, indeed, a pros- 
trate CO. For a dis- 
tance of twenty yards 
midway of this course 
we are excluded from 
a view of either en- 
trance, and the dark- 
ness is about that of a 
night with one quar- 
ter of the moon. The 
vault becomes lower 
here — in some places 
scarcely more than 
thirty feet high — and 
springs immediately 
from the floor. The 
situation is awful and 
oppressive : the voice 
sounds unnatural, and 
rumbles strangely and 
fearfully along the 
arch of stone. We 
are encoffined in the 
solid rock : there is a 
strange pang in the 
beating heart in its im- 
prisonment, so impen- 
etrable, black, hope- 
less, and we hurry to 
meet the light of day. 
In that light we are disentombed : we 
cast off the confinements of the black 
space through which we have passed, 
and we are instantly introduced to a 
scene so luminous and majestic that in 
a moment our trembling eyes are capti- 
vated, and our hearts lifted in unutter- 
able worship of the Creator's works. 

It is that sheer wall of rock which we 
have already mentioned, where the arch 
and the other side of the Tunnel break 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



145 



away into the mountain slope : a high 
wall slightly impending ; an amphithea- 
tre, extending one hundred yards, of 
awful precipices ; a clean battlement, 
without a joint in it, five hundred feet 
high. And this splendid height and 
breadth of stone, that a thousand storms 
have polished, leaving not a cleft of soil 
in it — this huge, unjointed masonry 
raised against the sky, gray and weath- 
er-stained, with glittering patches of 
light on it — is yet part 
of the same huge rock 
which towered at the 
farther end of the 
Tunnel, and through 
whose seamless cavity 
we have traveled two 
hundred yards. It is 
in this view that the 
mystery of the scene 
seizes the mind and 
the last element of 
sublimity is added to it. 
It is in this view that 
the Natural Tunnel we 
had come to see as a 
mere "curiosity" takes 
rank among the great- 
est wonders of the 
world. What Power, 
what possible imagin- 
able agency of Nature, 
could have worked out 
this stupendous scene ? 
For all the wonders 
and curiosities of Na- 
ture within the breadth 
of man's discovery, 
there is always an at- 
tempt to construct 
some theory of a cause. 
There is some scheme 
of probabilities, or at least of possibil- 
ities, that may be adjusted to the case 
— some ingenuity that will supply some- 
thing satisfactory, more or less, to the ig- 
norance of man and his demand for an 
explanation. Thus the Natural Bridge 
in Rockbridge county has been ac- 
counted for on the hypothesis — we be- 
lieve of Professor Rogers, once of the 
University of Virginia — of the worn exit 
of an inland sea that in some immeas- 
10 



urable time washed its way through the 
Blue Ridge to the ocean. But neither 
water nor fire can be taxed by human 
ingenuity as the cause of the Natural 
Tunnel — a scene which, havmg ap- 
proached in wonder, or even in its low- 
er tones of "curiosity," we are yet com- 
pelled to leave in unutterable amaze- 
ment. Look at the breadth, the mag- 
nitude of the scene — an unbroken rock 
eight hundred feet in length, averaging, 




THE NATURAL TUNNEL — LOOKING OUT. 

say, three hundred feet in height to 
where the soil clothes it, and measur- 
ing nine hundred feet across the face 
of the lower entrance of the Tunnel : 
multiply these numbers together for the 
cubic volume of this mountain of rock, 
and then inquire if it is possible that the 
Natural Tunnel could have been worn 
— and worn to such dimensions as we 
have already given of it, and which we 
have described as clean rock through- 



146 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



out — by the action of water, operating 
under any imaginable pressure or in 
any conceivable time ! But the theory 
of the agency of water, anyhow, is dis- 
credited by a single circumstance — the 
inequalities of the height of the arch, 
varying as much as from eighty or nine- 
ty feet in some places, to twenty in 
others. Again, the phenomenon fails 
to strike us as one of volcanic action. 
There aie none of the irregularities of 
an .upheaval : there are no signs of a 
force rending the mountain and tearing 
it asunder. The impression of the scene 
— and it is here where its sublimity is 
unexampled — is not as of some mighty 
force that has raised the crust of the 
earth, or that has rent the rock, or worn 
through it, or delved in it, but as of 
some mysterious Power, winged with 
all the winds of heaven and browed 
like the thunderbolt, that has battered 
its way through the solid rock, tearing 
away everything in its path, strewing it 
with the huge, sharp ruins that now 
choke the stream, and that has rushed 
through it all like the screaming, invis- 
ible body of a storm which scatters dis- 
may around, and leaves behind it the 
voiceless, uninscribed monuments of a 
sublime and inscrutable wonder ! 

The conception is terrible. The im- 
agination is strained as we stand within 
the august portals of this scene, med- 
itadng a question which ever recurs — 
feeling that shock which verges on in- 
sanity, smiting the feeble mind of man 
whenever he takes into his hands the 
dark chain of causation. We let fall 
in the strange doorway where we stand 
the links of thought that thrill us too 
powerfully, and we look to other parts 
of the scene to moderate our emotion. 

Turning our eyes away from the bat- 
tlement of rock to the opposite side 
of the ravine, a new revelation of the 
grand and picturesque awaits us. Here 
a gigantic cliff, but one broken with 
rock and soil, and threaded to its sum- 
mit by a sapling growth of the buckeye, 
the linden and the pine, rises almost 
perpendicularly from the water's edge 
to a height nearly equal to that of the 
opposite wall of rock. A natural plat- 



form is seen to project over it, and yet 
a few yards farther there is an insulated 
cliff, a Cyclopean chimney, so to speak, 
scarcely more than a foot square at its 
top, rising in the form of a turret at 
least sixty feet above its basement, 
which is a portion of the imposing cliff 
we have mentioned. It is at once per- 
ceived that here are two points of view 
that will give us new, and perhaps the 
most imposing, aspects of the scene. To 
attain these points, however, it is neces- 
sary to make a circuit of half a mile ; 
and the sinking sun admonishes us to 
defer this new interest of the scene un- 
til to-morrow. 

* * * * 

It is well that we did so. After a 
comfortable lodging in a farm-house 
two miles away, where a substantial sup- 
per, flanked with the invariable milk and 
honey of the mountains, and a bed of 
snowy white linen attesting that cleanli- 
ness so beautiful when found beneath 
the rude roof, and yet so common in all 
the homes of the mountaineers, had re- 
freshed us, we remounted for the Tun- 
nel in the early morning, and were soon 
to find that the rising sun was to give a 
new and unexpected glory to the scene. 
This time we ascend the mountain, in- 
stead of deflecdng as before. The road 
is easy : there are no difficulties of ac- 
cess to the points of view from the top 
of the Tunnel, and they are undoubt- 
edly the grandest. We pass to the plat- 
form before described by a few steps 
from the main road. It is a slab of rock 
projecting from an open patch of 
ground : a dead cedar tree is standing 
at its edge, throwing its gnarled and 
twisted arms, as in wild and widowed 
sorrow, over the awful scene below. 
We now see the great opposite amphi- 
theatre of rock in added grandeur, for 
we see it from above — we see across 
a chasm nine hundred feet wiJe and 
five hundred feet deep; and the ex- 
posure being almost exactly eastern, the 
long spears of the rising sun are being 
shattered on it. The effect is inex- 
pressibly grand. But there is one more 
circumstance to be added to the scene : 
we do not see from this observatory the 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



147 



irch, the entrance of the Tunnel. A 
ew yards farther the fearful chimney- 
.liaped rock invites to a more command- 
ng view, but the ascent is dangerous : 
he stone on top is loose, and so narrow 
hat two persons can scarcely stand on 
t. A single misstep, a moment's loss 
)f balance, and we should fall into eter- 
lity. But now the sense of peril is lost, 
)r is rather mingled, in the grandeur of 
he scene. It is a panoramic view. We 
lave now the whole sweep of the mural 
)recipice opposite ; the sun's glitter is 
ncessant on the polished stone ; the 
rees which fringe the bottom appear 
low scarcely more than shrubs ; the en- 
rance of the Tunnel has now come into 
iew ; and that which yesterday we 
bought so high and wide, now appears 
rom our amazing height as a stooped 
oorway. We imagine the gloomy en- 
rance into a cave of Erebus and Death, 
\\Q broken rocks lying within which 
Dok like black and mangled entrails, 
t is a fearful picture — it is that of a su- 
lernatural abode. 

AN INDIAN LOVER'S LEAP. 

It only needed some wild legend to 
rown and adorn the scene. Happily, 
uch is furnished, and, more fortunately 
Dr the interest of the reader, the tale is 
^'ue. Some tradition attaching to such 

spot is to be expected, and a spot, too, 
urrounded in past times by the Indian 
ribes. Romances are easily conjured 
p or invented in such a scene ; and in 
ict there is scarcely a remarkable cliff 
lat does not suggest some new version 
f the old story of "The Lover's Leap." 
Jut the tradition attached to the chim- 
ey-rock we have described was ascer- 
lined to be true before the writer was 
•illing to transcribe it ; and it furnishes 

story and a scene more dramatic than 
tiat of Pocahontas, or any of those ac- 
ounts of Indian life which have been 
arefuUy preserved in Virginia. 

The story was told the writer by a 
idy of the neighborhood, whose intelli- 
ence and manners might have adorned 
ny circle of listeners, and whose dark 
yes flashed with the spirit of her nar- 



rative. Her uncle, Colonel Henry S. 
Kane, a gentleman well known and 
honored in this part of Virginia, and of 
extreme age, remembers the main inci- 
dents of the story, which transpired 
some years after the close of the Revo- 
lutionary war, and which were related 
to him by persons of the neighborhood. 
The same incidents were preserved 
some years ago in a Tennessee paper 
( I think the Rogersville Times ) . So 
much for the authenticity of the story 
of Masoa. 

In 179-, what is now called Rye Cove, 
a small settlement near the Natural 
Tunnel, hemmed in by the mountains, 
was occupied by a fierce Indian tribe, 
probably the Wyandots. Masoa, the 
daughter of the chief, was enamored of 
a young warrior of her tribe, and their 
trysting-place was on the wild heights 
that overhang the subterranean passage 
of the mountain. Here it was her cus- 
tom to gather flowers and to meet her 
lover in the inspiration of the beautiful 
and solitary scene. But the old chief 
had other designs for his daughter : he 
had promised her in marriage to the 
chief of a neighboring tribe, and, scru- 
pulous as is the Indian in such affairs, 
he was relentless to the entreaties of his 
daughter, and angry when he discov- 
ered that her affections had been en- 
gaged by another. Masoa told her 
lover in the accustomed place of their 
meeting of the fate that had been deter- 
mined for her ; when it is said, he ad- 
vised, as the only means of averting 
their disappointment, that on the day 
appointed for the neighboring chief to 
claim his bride, Masoa should escape, 
ascend the sharp, high rock, and there, 
with her lover, proclaim him as her 
choice to her father and to the party 
who would probably pursue her ; the 
two threatening to cast themselves from 
the rock if compassion was not had on 
their love and the maiden released by 
her father from his hateful compact. It 
was hoped that the prospect of a self- 
immolation so awful, so instant and so 
dreadful in its aspects might touch the 
heart of the old chief, and save Masoa 
and her lover. The day came for the 



148 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



celebration of the marriage which the 
father had designed : the neighboring 
chief who was to bear away the prize 
attended with numerous followers. It 
was an occasion of barbaric splendor, 
to which all were invited ; but Masoa 
was missing. Search was instituted : 
her romantic habit of visiting the wild 
scene on the mountain was known, and 
it is said that a little brother, who had 
frequently accompanied her there, now 
innocently directed the party of pur- 
suers. These, to the number of several 
hundred, had searched through the cav- 
ernous recesses of the Tunnel. Assem- 
bled in the amphitheatre below which 
we have described, closely mingled in 
the ardor of pursuit, an appalling sight 
fell on their uplifted eyes — Masoa and 
her lover on the high stem of rock, his 
strong form uplifted above the screen 
of woods in clear relief against the sky, 
and embracing it the affrighted but un- 
shrinking maiden, who had ascended 
with him this awful altar of immolation. 
She had commenced to speak to the 
spectators below, and she was yet speak- 
ing loudly and vehemently in the last 
eager hope of reconciliation with her 
father and of safety for her lover, when 
an arrow whizzed through the air. It 
had been strung by the jealous and dis- 
appointed chief below. A stream of 
blood gushed from the breast of the 
warrior — that breast from which she had 
separated herself but a little space to 
rise to the proclamation of her love : 
she was seen to clasp him in her arms, 
to look long and tenderly on his face as 
if inquiring of the death that passed 
over and sealed it; and then, em- 
bracing him more tightly and uttering a 
wild, long shriek, she leaped down into 
the air, falling a mangled corpse on the 
rocks below, and bearing in her not 
yet loosened arms the dead body of her 
lover. The scene is not yet ended : 
another death completes it. Even while 
Masoa leaped, her brother, exasperated, 
in the quick agony of his revenge has 
stridden behind the assassin chief and 
planted his tomahawk in his brain. All 
three of the dead bodies are said to 
bave fallen nearly together. 



Such is "The Story of Masoa" — cha- 
racteristic of the Indian nature, its 
strength and ardor, containing no vio- 
lent improbability, assured by such liv- 
ing testimony as has given us those 
many narrations of Indian life which 
we do not hesitate to believe, and so 
vivid and dramatic, its natural arrange- 
ment falling in such a form of tragedy, 
that I may congratulate myself on 
saving it to the literature and romance 
of Virginia. 

A NARROW ESCAPE. 

A MORE modern and a more homely 
adventure is related of another part of the 
scene. It happened within the memory 
of the neighbors. In the perpendicular 
wall of rock at the lower entrance to 
the Tunnel occurs what is apparently a 
small cave or fissure. A man of the 
name of Dodson determined to explore 
it, as it was not unlikely that it might 
contain nitrous earth, since found to 
abound in the caves and grottoes of 
these mountains, from which saltpetre 
is extracted. Anyhow, Dodson was de- 
termined to take a look into this open- 
ing, and he was accordingly lowered 
from the top by a rope running over a 
log and let out by several men. The 
rope was eked out to a sufficient length 
by some plaited strands of the bark of 
leatherwood ; and on this perilous ten- 
ure, supported around the waist, he 
commenced his descent. The precipice 
shelves considerably here, and to draw 
himself to the edge of the fissure, Dod- 
son had provided himself with a long 
pole having a hook at the end. Throw- 
ing this on the edge of the fissure, he 
had nearly pulled himself there when he 
lost his hold and swung like a pendu- 
lum out into the middle of the ravine, 
suspended by an imperfect rope two hun- 
dred feet above the bed of rock below. 
At this moment, when he was perform- 
ing his fearful oscillations — so fearful 
that one of his neighbors standing at a 
point on the opposite cliff described it 
as if his body had been shmg at him 
across the abyss, causing the spectator 
to draw back instinctively — an eagle, 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



149 



scared from its nest in the fissure, and 
excited to protect it, flew out and at- 
tacked the already alarmed adventurer. 
Having dropped his pole in his conster- 
nation, he yet managed to defend him- 
self with a pocket-knife ; but while stab- 
bing at the eagle over his head, he 
severed one of the strands of his bark 
rope. The accident was unperceived 
by those who held the rope above, who 
were only notified that something fear- 
ful had happened by the screams of 
Dodson — " Pull ! for God's sake, pull !" 
He was saved, but the agony of sus- 
pense was too much for him ; and as 
the men caught him by the shoulders 
and dragged him over the top of the 
precipice, he fainted. The opening he 
had ventured so much to explore has 
since been found to be nothing but a 
shallow pocket in the rock. 

A RIDE IN THE DARK. 

It had been determined, in our leis- 
urely plan of journey, to leave the main 
road within a few miles of Salt Pond, 
deflecting to Eggleston's White Sulphur 
Springs, and to spend the night there. 
We had been told that the hotel accom- 
modations at the Pond were vile beyond 
description ; while Warren, who had 
spent a former season at Eggleston's, 
assured me, with good reason as I after- 
ward found, that it was the most de- 
licious and comfortable of resorts in the 
mountain region of Virginia. We should 
sup on broiled pheasants, drink the most 
famous of whisky toddies, and go to 
sleep on the banks of New river and in 
view of " Pompey's Pillar" and " C?esar's 
Arch," the magnificent rock-work throw- 
ing its shadows through our windows. 
So it was decided to spend the night at 
Eggleston's, and to devote the following 
day or days to Salt Pond, Bald Knob, 
Little Stony Falls, etc. It was a well- 
planned journey, but, alas ! how many 
such "gang a-gley !" 

At Blacksburg, where we tarried and 
lunched, we had been told that from 
Newport, nine miles across the moun- 
tains, it was but three miles to Eggles- 
ton's. We had thus been in no hurry 



to pursue our journey : the greater part 
of the way, up and down the mountain 
ridge, we had ridden very slowly ; and 
the sun had been set for a quarter of an 
hour when we reached Newpoi't, a set- 
tlement of twenty or thirty board houses 
on a little pad of soil at the bottom of 
a funnel-shaped cup formed by the high 
hills or mountains. As we passed 
through the toll-gate here, we asked the 
distance to Eggleston's Springs. 

" It's nine miles !" was the reply, not 
a little to our consternation. 

The night was gathering, the sky had 
become overcast with clouds, but we de- 
termined to pass on in view of the cheer 
that awaited us, much to be preferred 
to that suggested by the tarnished sign- 
board of the Newport hotel that creaked 
dismally over our heads. We had rid- 
den about three miles when one of those 
rain-storms which spring up so suddenly 
in the mountains absolutely engulfed us 
in darkness. It was so dark that I could 
see nothing before me, not even Jacky's 
ears : the roar of the winds through the 
mountain pines was terribly grand — a 
solemn diapason that drowned our 
voices ; the air of the night had become 
so cold that my benumbed fingers could 
scarcely feel the reins of the bridle ; 
there was no sign of human habitation 
near ; and, to suggest the real perils of 
our situation, we could hear through 
fitful intervals of the storm of wind and 
rain the sound of rushing water below 
us, telling us that our road overhung 
the deep channel of a river. We rode 
on in single file, Jacky bringing up 
the rear, faithfully keeping the pace of 
the horse in front, but absolutely re- 
fusing to move a peg when the attempt 
had been made to put him in advance. 

Presently a glimmering light was de- 
scried in the encircling sea of darkness, 
in which were absolutely obliterated all 
our ideas of distance. We could only 
tell that we approached it by its growing 
larger, and could only infer that it sig- 
nified that a house was near. 

We shouted at the top of our voices, 
"Are we in the road to Eggleston's 
Springs.''" "Yes," came in reply a 
gruff voice: then followed something 



15° 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



indistinct about "fork " in the road and 
keeping by the side of a fence. 

"But, my friend," I remonstrated, "I 
can't see any fence — I can't see any- 
thing." 

"I can't help that," was the boor's 
reply ; and the door must have been 
slammed to, for the light suddenly dis- 
appeared. 

There was evidently no prospect of 
any hospitable resource here. We rode 
on through the darkness and the rain, 
Warren in front, trusting to the eyes 
and instinct of his faithful steed. In 
miserable plight we toiled through the 
storm, blind, wet, dogged, with the cold 
wind smiting our faces, insensible now 
to its really sublime effect, as, like an 
invisible army with chariots, it rumbled 
far away up the mountain sides. We 
must have gone a mile or so, when, just 
as a blast of wind cut fiercely over our 
heads, I heard a sharp exclamation in 
front — 

" I've lost my hat !" 

Expressions of sympathy were of no 
avail. Warren could not spare his hat, 
but in such a storm it might have lodged 
near by or it might have blown a quar- 
ter of a mile away. I found that War- 
ren had dismounted, for he felt his way 
to me and requested me to hold his 
horse while he attempted to light a 
match under the folds of his cloak. 

"What in the world are you going to 
do ?" I asked. 

"I'm going to find my hat," was the 
reply. 

A match was lighted after repeated 
failures, then a wisp of paper, which 
showed a fence near by. The rails were 
torn down, and we soon had, by aid of 
the wind, a fierce fire burning. It was 
a wild scene — the fire hissing through 
the rain, and throwing its twisted arms 
up into the black sky ; Warren, his head 
bound by a white handkerchief, flour- 
ishing a pine torch as he traversed the 
road for a hundred yards searching for 
the lost hat ; while far away some alarm- 
ed dogs bayed at this unexpected appa- 
rition of the night. We had searched 
in vain for a full half hour, and were on 
the point of despairing, when I heard a 



glad cry from Warren. He had found 
his hat : it had been lodged fifty yards 
away in a corner of the fence. 

Having warmed ourselves at the fire 
before extinguishing it — and not be- 
fore, weary and disgusted, I had pro- 
posed to spend the night by it — we re- 
mounted for the prosecution of our jour- 
ney. Warren was sure that it was a 
plain road to the springs ; the horses 
would easily find it ; the rain was dimin- 
ishing, and it was yet early in the night. 
We plucked up our spirits, and ven- 
tured a jog-trot in the darkness. Our 
steeds had their own way, except oc- 
casionally an application of the spur 
when they showed an unwillingness to 
proceed. 

We had just supposed we had gone 
far enough to look out for the lights of 
the springs, when "swash," "swash," 
came something in my face, then a 
stroke on the knee, and then some ob- 
struction overhead that nearly dragged 
me from my saddle. The evidences 
were unmistakable : I had been smitten 
by boughs of trees ; we were in the 
woods! Nothing could be seen around 
us : it was pitch-dark, and the rain was 
yet falling. I twisted a piece of news- 
paper out of my pocket to make a torch. 
Warren had but one match left. It 
fizzled, and then expired before I could 
reach the paper to it. In dogged despe- 
ration I would have rolled from my 
mule, have put my back against a tree 
and have waited for the morning ; but 
Warren was more resolute and vigor- 
ous. Having dismounted, he twisted a 
white handkerchief around his hat as a 
signal in the darkness, and commenced 
X.O feeliox signs of a road. I coul-d only 
follow helplessly through the darkness 
after the white speck, holding out my 
hands for fear of limbs of the trees that 
might strike me. After groping about 
some time, Warren was sure that he 
had got into some sort of a road. It 
was strewn with the loose and rotting 
soil of the woods, but he could feel hard 
earth at times, and prints of wheels in 
it. It afterward proved, as we learned 
next day, a mere wagon trace to bring 
out wood cut in the forest ; and that my 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



companion should have discovered this 
exit was, as he claimed, sheer luck, al- 
though in the confidence he had now 
established in me I was disposed to give 
him credit for some of that mysterious 
woodcraft which is supposed to be 
learned in the mountains. 

It was only by means of feeling that 
Warren, after a while, could determine 
that we had come out into a main road. 
The question now was which way to 
turn. In this instance, Warren's luck 
forsook him, for we turned to the right, 
exactly away from the route we should 
have pursued to Eggleston's Springs, 
the lights of which, as we discovered 
next day, were not a half a mile to the 
left, under a hill, on the brow of which 
we had hesitated. We must have trav- 
eled three miles : not a light visible, not 
a sound heard but the groanings of the 
dying storm or the splashes of the feet 
of our slow steeds through puddle and 
mud, assuring us that we were on a well- 
traveled road. Suddenly, Warren drew 
rein and commenced hallooing. He 
told me to join in, and for several min- 
utes we yelled like madmen, although I 
had no idea what the demonstration 
was intended for. A distant barking of 
dogs at last replied, and I found that 
Warren had ingeniously sought in this 
way to find whether any human habita- 
tions were near. We rode toward the 
sound of the barking, exciting it when- 
ever it ceased by resumed yells, so as to 
get fresh indications of our way. Soon 
the barking became furious, and we 
judged that we were near some house. 
We hallooed with increased zeal : there 
must have been half a dozen dogs bark- 
ing in line before us, but there was no 
reply from any human voice. 

"This won't do," exclaimed Warren : 
"let us make our way through the dogs 
and find the house." I could hear him 
urging his horse forward. From a pas- 
sionate exclamation I understood that 
the animal recoiled, and that he had 
dismounted to lead it. Suddenly, the 
white crown made by the handkerchief 
round his hat disappeared, as if swal- 
lowed up in the ground. A laugh re- 
assured me. Warren had tumbled some 



six feet down a bank, but was uninjured 
and was already on his feet. 

Just then a strong but kindly voice 
quieted the dogs and greeted our ears : 
"Why, stranger, what's got hold of 
you?" The owner of the voice, as far 
as he could be perceived in the dark 
when he had come up to us, was a large 
man, bareheaded. He had been aroused 
from his bed evidently in haste. We 
explained our situation. The man re- 
plied he had " no shelter fitten for stran- 
gers," but very civilly gave us direc- 
tions by which we might make a circuit 
on the main road two miles and a. half 
to the springs. But he added that the 
springs being in the next valley, there 
was a rough path over the ridge of the 
mountain that might take us there in 
half a mile. 

I told him I was distressed and in 
poor health, and unwilling to trust the 
road. Would he guide us by the near 
way ? and I would pay him anything he 
asked for the service. 

"Well, gentlemen," he replied, "I 
will take you across the mountain." 
Taking hold of Warren's bridle, he 
struck out in the dark, my mule follow- 
ing (for I had found that I could always 
trust the beast for that). I could tell 
that we were ascending a mountain only 
from the spasmodic action of Jacky's 
back and the necessity of clutching his 
scant mane. We were half an hour 
making the ascent. Then the mule 
commenced stepping down, down, as 
into a gulf of darkness, and as if its 
lowest depth never would be reached. 
But I had become desperate : the reins 
dangled loosely on Jacky's neck, and 
I no longer thought of precipices or 
chasms. 

Presently the mule'g feet sounded on 
a hard, level road, and the cheerful 
lights of Eggleston's Springs were seen 
not a hundred yards away. I rode to 
the side of our faithful guide. The no- 
ble, hardy fellow, to my surprise, had 
come bareheaded all the way : I felt his 
shaggy hair drenched with the rain as I 
reached out my hand in the dark to 
grope for and to grasp his hard fist in 
token of my gratitude. I asked, "What 



152 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



shall I pay you, my good sir, for your 
great kindness ?" 

''Not a cent, stranger," he replied, 
quietly : " I am jes' glad I got you out 
of bein' lost." 

Again and again we pressed money 
upon him, or that he would come to the 
springs and let us entertain him for the 
night. He would take no reward, and 
must return to his house. The beautiful 
and touching grace of the act of kind- 
ness done by this simple mountaineer 
was, that he made nothing of it, and 
seemed to be surprised that we thought 
it remarkable. Yet this man had left 
his comfortable bed, gone out in the 
darkness to strangers who might have 
been murderers or marauders for aught 
he knew, and at their simple request 
had gone with them, uncovered, through 
the rain, toiling in mud, up and down a 
rough mountain ; and now, storm- 
drenched, at midnight, having to make 
his way back home, this poor fellow — a 
man who worked hard for his scanty 
bread — who perhaps bitterly knew the 
value of money — refused the least re- 
ward for what he had done, and was 
satisfied to take with him on the dark, 
rough path on which he was to grope 
back through the unceasing storm, the 
consciousness of having done a kind- 
ness to strangers. 

Truly this world is made up of differ- 
ent people ; but never have I been so 
touched by the lesson of something good 
and noble in human nature, never have 
I thought better of my fellow-men, never 
more sincerely thanked God for what 
there is in this beautiful world, than 
when shaking by the hand this rough 
inhabitant of the mountains, this true 
nobleman of Nature found in the forest. 

The name of this man is George H. 
Williams ; and I record it here as an 
expression of gratitude and of admira- 
tion which I am sure the reader will re- 
spect. 

THE BOTTOM FALLING OUT. 

I WAS much amused by an anecdote I 
had heard at Montgomery White Sul- 
phur Springs. Some ladies there had 



planned a trip to Salt Pond, a small lake 
on the top of a mountain, and reputed 
to be unfathomable. The anxious mam- 
ma of one of the former insisted upon 
exacting a promise from the gentleman 
who was to escort the treasure of her 
hopes that on no account should she be 
permitted to venture into a boat and 
go upon the water. The gentleman re- 
monstrated that there could be no pos- 
sible danger in this part of the amuse- 
ments that had been designed. " I don't 

know about that, Mr. A ," rejoined 

the old lady: "it is a curious sort of 
thing, that pond, and if I was on it 1 
should feel all the time as if the bottovi 
7nightfall out P' 

A CONTRAST. 

But what, asks the gentle reader, of 
those female beauties of the mountain 
pictured in poetry and read of in ro- 
mances — creatures with gazelle eyes, 
"hair flowing like Alpine torrents," 
cheeks wooed by the breezes, etc., etc.? 
Is there any antitype in reality of the 
mountain maid, or is she but the ideal, 
the wood nymph, of poets and romance- 
writers ? In fact, it is to be confessed 
that the female of "the child of Nature" 
is not commonly prepossessing; and, 
shocking as it may be to our poetical 
preconceptions, the girl of the mountain 
is usually found to be sallow, ungram- 
matical and altogether unlovely, a 
gawky specimen of ill-dressed human- 
ity, having ropy hair, standing in clout- 
ed brogans, and furnished with great 
red, clawing hands. The disillusioning 
process is sharp and painful enough. 
But stop : we must not be too hasty in 
our induction. Rare as may be the 
mountain maid of the rural school of 
poetry, there is such a being. And when 
Nature, in her infinite variety of gifts, 
does plant a flower of female beauty in 
the mountains, does out of this remote 
and uncultivated humanity mould a face 
and form of loveliness, the creation is 
as infinitely exquisite as it is bold. 

When this creation is found, the type 
of beauty can only be described by the 
word "exquisite." and we find ourselves 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



153 



wondering more at the perfect finish of 
le picture than at any separate feature, 
'he most perfectly beautiful girl the 
'riter has even seen was from one of 
le mountain homes of Tazewell. The 
escription is merely that of an artist : 
e knows nothing of her but a name 
asually mentioned in a crowd. She 
ras standing in the gathering of an ag- 
icultural fair at Lynchburg. She was 
ressed in the simplest merino, and a 
,risp of the commonest shawl had fallen 
rom her shoulder and was twisted 
round the firm hip, whose form Fash- 
Dn had never disguised. The pose was 
hat of the unconscious grace of a clas- 
ic statue. A wealth of hair, of yellow- 
5h-dark color streaked with red — that 
awny, amorous hair so seldom seen — 
loated down her shoulders, and was 
natched by the warm light of young de- 
ire that glowed on the cheeks and made 
)ensive, half confessions as it swam like 
he smouldering fire of a sacrifice in the 
;olden-blue depths of her eyes. The 
ace was oval, classic, but warm from 



the glow of a perpetual and insatiate 
love, and the rich lips appeared con- 
stantly pouted for kisses, that could 
never be satisfied. It might have been 
supposed that there was some mark of 
uncultivation, of rusticity, to mar the 
picture and to break the spell of the ad- 
mirer. But no : Nature had done her 
work with a completeness that left 
nothing to be desired. The feet were 
small and exquisitely formed. The un- 
jeweled hands were as dainty as those 
of a princess. Looking back at the 
face, the expression of a pure, uncon- 
scious voluptuousness that swam over 
it, yet contained in the severest classical 
types of virtue and modesty, was per- 
fect. I have attempted no description 
of the eyes. Mr. Longfellow has done 
it in Hyperion : ' Eyes like the flower 
of the nightshade, pale and blue, but 
sending forth golden rays." Such hu- 
man orbs are seldom seen. They haunt 
us for ever : the form is withdrawn, the 
face is absent — "only her eyes re- 
mained." 




THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



" PURGATORY." 

THE most romantic route to Punch- 
eon Run Falls is undoubtedly that 
which leads up the stream, clinging to 
its banks or stepping along the rocks 




beauty. Occasionally he may look a 
long distance through the canon. For 
miles the stream is closely confined 
by walls of shrub -covered rock; and 
in the patch of sky overhead the sun 
is visible but for two 
or three hours of the 
day. An old moun- 
taineer remarked 
to us that none of 
the deer, bears and 
other wild animals 
hunted in that vicin- 
ity had ever been 
known to attempt the 
crossing of Puncheon 
Run until it emerges 
from the mountain, 
io wild and violent is 
its course through the 
chasm above. 



"purgatory" — VIEW ON PUNCHEON RUN 

piled in its channel. It is perhaps not 
more difficult than scrambling down the 
mountain side ; and one who can work 
his way through the "Purgatory" of 
broken timber, brush and rock, will 
be rewarded with vistas of wonderful 
154 



FISHER'S VIEW. 

About five miles 
from the Alleghany 
Springs towers " Fish- 
er's View"- — one of 
the finest and most 
characteristic moun- 
tain views to be found 
m this region. It is 
approached by a well- 
graded road, which 
will soon be comple- 
ted to the mountain 
top, and which is now 
eked out by a narrow 
but sound path, along 
which one may ride 
safely on horseback. 
A few dead, dismantled pines project 
from the mountain comb, which affords 
a view around half the horizon. A nat- 
ural platform juts out, a convenient ob- 
servatory strewed with leaves and dead 
soil, on which we may luxuriously re- 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



155 



cline while "taking in" the delicious 
beauties of the scene. 

We have described it as a character- 
istic mountain view. It is emphatically 
such, and one obtains here a vivid gen- 
eral idea, a typical impression, of the 
aspects of our mountainous country. 
There is scarcely any breadth of land- 
scape in the scene, if we except a patch 
of open land on which glimmer the 
white cottages of the springs, and im- 
perfect glimpses of a valley of gray 
fields breaking away toward the Vir- 



ginia and Tennessee Railroad. It is 
mountains — mountains all around, 
mountains interminable : now running 
in straight ranges with almost mathe- 
matical precision, now rising into pyra- 
midal points, now jagged and indented 
by the blue sky. A companion com- 
pared the knotted expanse to "tobacco 
hills." Yet more striking was the home- 
ly phrase of an old lady who had never 
lived above tidewater, and who, having 
been transported in the night-time on 
a swift railroad over the Blue Ridee, 




FISHER'S VIEW. 



looked in the morning from the win- 
dows of the cars, and exclaimed, " Law 
sakes ! what a biatipy country !" 

The name of the view is taken from 
Fisher, the artist, who made a picture 
of it last season, declaring that he had 
seen nothing in Europe to equal its wild 
and unkempt variety. It is seldom, in- 
deed, that a mountain scene is so little 
disturbed by "clearings," or any signs 
of cultivation. Except the buildings of 
the Alleghany Springs, which lie at our 
feet, there is nothing in the intervening 
valleys to indicate the presence of man ; 
while, in the distance, the huge moun- 
tains, dark, forbidding and sombre, do 



not relent from their frown until far 
away the dark blue grows fainter and 
fainter, and they soften to meet the em- 
braces of the sky and mingle in the 
same lisrht cerulean hue. 



LITTLE STONY FALLS. 

Little Stony Creek is a tributary 
worthy of New River. We had to ride 
seven miles from Eggleston's Springs to 
find it, hid as it is in a deep and narrow 
valley. Hitching our steeds at a saw- 
mill, we provided ourselves with veri- 
table pilgrims' staffs to aid us on the rug- 
ged path to the Falls, half a mile below. 



156 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



The stream has an average width of 
fifteen or eighteen feet, but the descent 
is great, and the water rushes through 
a deep channel with the volume and 
contention of a mountain torrent. At 
times it darts by us with arrowy swift- 
ness ; a cape of rock wounds its side, 
and it writhes for a moment as if in 
torment ; again it passes into cascades, 




LITTLE STONY FALLS. 

with here and there a divided current 
wandering playfully away to a worn 
basin, and throwing up drops of silvery 
water far into the air. 

The path was rough and difficult 
enough to please my romantic notions. 
At one place, where we had to cross the 
stream, we found the rude bridge had 
been swept away, and our only resource 



was to "coon" a small tree, thick with 
branches, that was found lower down 
fallen across the chasm. The process 
is to straddle the tree and work the body 
along by the hands, with the necessity 
of "spraddling" in a very ungraceful 
manner whenever a limb jutting out 
from the body of the tree is encountered. 
I was some time working my passage, 
and I found that War- 
ren, who was in my 
rear, had been amus- 
ing himself with mak- 
ing a pencil sketch 
of the performance. 

But there was no 
time for idling, for 
the sound of the Falls 
was already in our 
ears. Spanning a turn 
of the stream, we 
come to a decayed 
wooden walk just on 
the brow of the Falls, 
and affording an ex- 
cellent view. The 
water descends sixty 
feet clear ; breaks in 
wild confusion upon 
a succession of short 
falls, and then rocks 
itself in a wide, worn 
basin fifty feet deep. 
The impetuosity of 
the stream has be- 
fore been spoken of, 
but here it is grand : 
it does not fall, but it 
leaps far out into the 
air, and we might 
easily stand between 
_^ it and the wall of 

■---"' blank rock that mea- 

sures the descent. 
With a fierce, almost 
deafening, sound the stream springs 
over the chasm. It is fearfully lifelike, 
and makes one involuntarily shudder 
as the torrent, with frothy lip and wild 
scream, leaps past us to the torture of 
the rocks below. 

At the foot of the Falls the scene and 
sounds are less terrific. We hear the 
incessant trampling of the waters on a 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



157 



succession of short falls below. There 
are graceful shadows on the rocky face 
of the cliff; miniature rainbows hang 
around the falling waters ; and for a 
hundred yards, such is the force of the 
main fall, the mist floats in the sun- 
beams and dances in our faces. The 
framing of the picture is curious. The 
entire structure of rock is seamed like 
masonry, and the abutments are almost 
as well defined as if the hand of man 
had reared them. But the other sur- 
roundings of the scene overpower the 
suggestion of Art having intruded here. 



A mountain crested with towering 
plumes guards the scene, and Nature 
reigns in unbroken grandeur around. 



THE LURAY VALLEY. 

The Valley of Virginia properly ex- 
tends from the wall of the Alleghany 
to the edge of the terrace known as the 
Atlantic slope, which rises above the 
maritime or Atlantic plain — this latter 
at its extremity south of Virginia join- 
ing the plain of the Mississippi. The 
features of it are ridges of hills and 





THL LLRW \ ALl I V 



long valleys running parallel to the 
mountains. It is rich in soil and culti- 
vation, and has an immense water- 
power in the streams and rivers which, 
flowing from the mountains across it, 
are precipitated over its rocky edge to 
the plains below. It has been calcu- 
lated that Rockbridge county alone has 
in water-power and sites a capacity for 
manufacturing greater than that of the 
whole State of Massachusetts ! 

In a more limited and more common 
acceptation, the Valley of Virginia has 
its head in the tract of country between 
Lexington and Staunton, becoming well 



defined toward the latter place, thence 
gradually widening toward the Potomac, 
and debouching into the hill region of 
Pennsylvania. In the late war it was a 
prominent theatre of strategy, as it af- 
forded the most obvious avenue for an 
attack on Washington, exposing that 
city to constant danger from a flank 
movement. 

The most remarkable flexure or minor 
formation of the valley occurs near the 
middle of it. About half-way between 
Staunton and the Potomac two ranges 
of mountains run parallel for twenty- 
five miles, uniting in Massanutten (Mes- 



158 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



inetto) Mountain, which divides the 
branches of the Shenandoah, and ends 
abruptly on the south in Rockingham 
county. This is the Luray Valley — a 
beautiful vale branching off from and 
thence running parallel to that main 
gallery through which the troops of 
Stonewall Jackson marched in 1862, 
and where that warrior won his first 





VIEW ON DRY CREEK. 

and imperishable laurels. It was terri- 
bly devasted at a later day by Sheridan. 
The beauties of this valley have often 
been told. Nothing can exceed the 
loveliness of the Shenandoah in this 
part of its course. Straying by its 
banks, we watch the waters rippling 
under the mottled arms of the syca- 
mores. There is the swell of turf and 
slanting branches on the hillside ; the 



spaces of the deep blue sky, at which 
we look from the narrow vales j utting 
on the stream, are edged round with 
dark tree-tops ; and beyond is the forest 
full of whispered mysteries, within which 
are the dramas of a thousand creations 
— the birth, life and death of unseen 
flowers. The picture must be badly 
stripped in winter. What differences, 
indeed, wrought by 
the seasons on all 
this "pomp of groves 
and garniture of 
fields !" Now tresses 
of newly-budded 
flowers hung up in 
the forest, now "hon- 
eycombs of green," 
and on the warm 
fields the freckled 
wings of the butter- 
fly ; anon the yellow 
leaves, and the owl's 
cry of coming winter. 

DRY CREEK. 

A RADIUS of about 
forty miles, sweeping 
from the Greenbrier 
White Sulphur as a 
centre, will describe 
a circle containing 
the most important 
part of the Springs 
Region of Virginia. 
Within this circle we 
have to the north the 
famous cluster of 
springs in Bath coun- 
. ty — the Warm, the 
Hot, the Healing and 
the Alum Springs ; 
the distance to the 
former measured by the common route 
of travel being thirty-five miles ; to the 
east, the Sweet Springs, seventeen miles 
from the common centre ; to the south, 
the Salt Sulphur Springs, twenty-four 
miles, and the Red Sulphur Springs, 
forty-one miles ; and to the west, the 
Blue Sulphur Springs, twenty-two miles. 
In leaving this centre of the Springs 
Region in anv direction, we can scarce- 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



^59 



ly fail to meet refreshing views of moun- 
tain scenery. They lie on every hand. 
A general description might suit them 
all, and we select from our sketch-book 
but one, taken from the scenery of the 
Greenbrier. It is on Dry Creek, a few 
miles from the White Sulphur, and may 
be regarded as a specimen of the ex- 
tent and combination of mountain views 
in this part of Vir- 
ginia. The moun- 
tains are not so high 
or so steep as where 
the Alleghany ridge 
is more severely de- 
fined ; the views are 
softer ; there is more 
breadth of landscape ; 
there is more for the 
eye to distinguish and 
to combine ; and the 
distant mountains, in- 
stead of being thrust 
up as boundaries to 
our vision, "swell 
from the vale," and 
are lost in pleasing 
indistinctness near 
the rim of the hori- 
zon. In fact, each of 
the characteristic pic- 
tures of mountain 
scenery in Virginia 
has its merits : that 
which rises in clear 
and abrupt outlines 
against the sky, and 
gives bold and dis- 
tinct effects, and that 
which in infinite va- 
riety of landscape 
reaches to the limits 
of vision, and with a ~" 

mingling of effects 
yet prefers the pictu- 
resque to the sublime. 

TROUT POOL. 

The Healing Springs are three miles 
distant from the Hot, and eight miles 
from the Warm Springs. The scenes 
around invite the visitor to numerous 
walks and repay him with varied recrea- 



tions. The valley is hemmed on every 
side by the coolest and deepest shades, 
while the buildings shine pleasantly 
through the trees. On one side, the 
Warm Springs Mountain pierces the sky 
with its long bleak boundary, and lower 
ledges of rock guard recesses which we 
shrink at first from exploring, but once 
secluded in which we find places of re- 




TROUT POOL. 

pose and enjoy a delightful and perfect 
solitude. At the end of a short walk is 
a cascade, falling into a gorge where 
the sun at noonday penetrates with 
shorn rays and distributes a soft and 
shaded light. It shines, however, with 
full splendor on the snowy wreaths 
which the falling water has twined on 
the srreat rocks. 



i6o 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



A pleasant recreation is here for the 
angler, who with pliant rod draws "the 
gamest of game fish," the speckled 
trout, from his native element. The 
sport is as much that of hunting as of 
fishing, as the angler has to steal upon 
this timid fish, disporting in the clear, 
crystal stream, with as silent and stealthy 
a tread as if still-hunting for dter. He 
creeps softly along the stream, conceal- 
ing himself behind a rock, bush or bluff, 
careful to throw no shadow on the wa- 
ter •. from his cover he casts his line 
with a long pole ; the hook is taken at 
once greedily, if the trout has not been 
alarmed ; and the glittering spoil, with 
its purple and gold yet reeking with 
water, is thrown panting on the green 
sward. It is a fine sport, but we must 
avoid noise, and practice a careful step, 
or we spoil the catch. The mountain 
trout is a gem to look at, and a sweet 
morsel for the palate when the last 
offices of the kitchen have been done 
for him. 



THE NATURAL BRIDGE. 

There was a time when the Natural 
Bridge was esteemed among the great- 
est wonders of this continent. Of late 
years it has languished in obscurity 
and neglect, visited only by stray trav- 
elers from the Virginia Springs, or by 
frugal pic-nic parties from the near town 
of Lexington and the neighborhood : so 
at least we inferred from a notice ex- 
traordinary posted at the hotel, warning 
visitors who omit to patronize the larder 
that they will be charged fifty cents a 
head for the privilege of looking at the 
Bridge ! The neglect of this sublime 
spectacle, once so attractive to the mul- 
titude of sight-seers, is difficult to be 
explained when we consider the easy 
access to it. 

The common route is by way of 
Lynchburg, thence thirty-eight miles on 
the James River and Kanawha Canal. 
The canal divides immediately at the 
foot of the Blue Ridge, one section ex- 
tending up the North River to the town 
of Lexington, and the other pursuing 
the banks of the James to Buchanan, 



short of which you can stop at the 
mouth of Cedar Creek, within two miles 
of the Natural Bridge. From a few 
miles above Lynchburg the route by 
the canal is adorned with mountain 
scenery of the richest and most varied 
description, and the traveler passes 
slowly, going scarcely more than three 
miles an hour, through an almost con- 
tinuous gallery of pictures. The writer 
on his trip had the advantage of a 
moonlit night and of the company of 
some musical ladies. As the boat 
moves slowly and so easily that unless 
for passing objects you can imagine it 
at rest, you see an horizon broken and 
pierced with mountain spurs ; at one 
time under the shadow of great cliffs, 
again passing along silver-clad willows, 
where the James flows placidly through 
meadows with the trophy of shivered 
moonbeams on its bosom ; in the dis- 
tance mountains with twinkling fires 
on them, or the red glare of burning 
woods kindled by stray fires during the 
drought ; and so, in this dioramic pro- 
cession, with the music of sweet voices 
in the air, and the melancholy wail of 
the boatman's horn occasionally intrud- 
ing, we travel on to the rugged back- 
bone of the Blue Ridge. 

Here, where the James River emerges 
from the mountains on the line of Am- 
herst and Rockbridge counties, the 
scene is surpassingly picturesque. Over- 
looking Balcony Falls, the pyramid- 
shaped mountain throws in the night 
its pointed shadow on the mingled wa- 
ters of the James and North Rivers like 
a great spear-head to divide them. 
Where it terminates in the water it falls 
in a precipitous cliff, the rocky face of 
which looked at once grand and weird 
as we saw it in the moonlight. A branch 
of the canal, as we have said, proceeds 
up the North River, Avhile that along the 
banks of the James, which we pursue 
to our destination, passes into a wilder 
scene. 

The stage-road, coincident here with 
the canal — either conveyance being at 
the choice of the traveler — affords a 
succession of views of the most pictu- 
resque and romantic character. As the 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



i6i 



traveler enters the gap of the Blue 
Ridge from the east, the winding course 
of the stage-coach carries him up the 
mountain's side until he has gained an 
elevation of hundreds of feet above the 
James, over the waters of which the zig- 
zag and rotten road hangs fearfully. 
On every side are gigantic mountains, 
intersected by black ravines ; and a 
mountain rivulet, 
slight and glittering 
from amid the prim- _^^ 

eval forest, dashes 
across the path, and, 
leaping from rock to 
rock, goes joyously 
on its way. 

On the North River 
the scenes are quiet- 
er. Emerging here, 
the traveler sees a 
beautiful and fertile 
country opening be- 
fore him, while the 
blue outlines still far- 
ther west of distant 
mountains in Rock- 
bridge bound his vis- 
ion. The water scene- 
ry is beautiful. Love- 
ly valleys debouch 
upon the stream; 
there are peaceful 
shadows in the steel- 
blue waters ; and on 
the broad shoulders 
of the cattle on the 
banks we see the dra- 
pery of the shadows 
of the trees beneath 
which they rest. The 
fisherman standing 
leg-deep in the water 
can see his face as in 
a mirror. 

But at present our way does not lie 
through these scenes. The canal-boat 
is taking us along the James in the 
moonlit night, and by the time the day 
has broken we are within two miles of 
the Natural Bridge. A rickety team 
awaits us at the lock-house where we 
disembark Through an air filled with 
golden vapor, and with the mists of the 
II 



morning yet hanging in the trees by the 
wayside, we proceed on our journey. 
The old stage-coach lumbers along un- 
der the thick, overhanging boughs of the 
forest pines, which scrape its top or strike 
in through the windows, scattering the 
dew-drops in the very faces of the pas- 
sengers, or perhaps smiting their cheeks 
with the sharp-pointed leaves. 




SCENE ON NORTH RIVER. 



Bridge is ob- 
it at a turn in 



The first view of the 
tained half a mile from 
the stage-road. It is revealed with the 
suddenness of an apparition. Raised a 
hundred feet above the highest trees of 
the forest, and relieved against the pur- 
ple side of a distant mountain, a whitish- 
gray arch is seen, in the distance as 
perfect and clean-cut as tne Egyptian 
inventor of the arch could have defined. 



l62 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



The tops of trees are waving in the in- 
terval, and we are relieved from the 
first impression that it is man's mason- 
ry, the work of art, on finding that it 
supports some fifteen or twenty feet of 
soil, in which trees and shrubbery are 
firmly imbedded — the verdant crown 
and testimony of Nature's great work. 
Here too we are divested of a notion 
which we believe is the popular one, 
that the Bridge is merely a huge slab 
of rock thrown across a chasm, or some 
such hasty and violent arrangement. 
It is no such thing. The arch and the 
approaches to it are formed of one 
solid rock : the average width of that 
portion which forms the Bridge is eighty 
feet, and beyond this the rock extends 
for a hundred feet or so in mural preci- 
pices, divided by only a single fissure, 
that makes a natural pier on the upper 
side of the Bridge, and up which climb 
the hardy firs, ascending step by step 
on the noble rock-work till they over- 
shadow you. 

This mighty rock, a single mass sunk 
in the earth's side, of which even what 
appears is stupendous, is of the same 
geological character — limestone cover- 
ed to the depth of from four to six feet 
with alluvial and clayey earth. The 
span of the arch runs from forty-five to 
sixty feet wide, and its height to the 
under line is one hundred and ninety- 
six feet, and to the head two hundred 
and fifteen feet. The form of the arch 
approaches the elliptical : the stage- 
road which passes over the Bridge 
runs from north to south, with an in- 
cline of thirty-five degrees, and the 
arch is carried over on a diagonal line 
— the very line of all others the most 
difficult for the architect to realize, and 
the one best calculated for picturesque 
effects. It is the proportions of Art in 
this wild, strange work of Nature, its 
adjustment in the very perfection of 
mechanical skill, its apparently deliber- 
ate purpose, that render it an object of 
interest and of wonder. The deep ra- 
vine over which it shoots, and which is 
traversed by the beautiful Cedar Creek, 
is not otherwise easily passed for sev- 
eral miles, either above or below the 



Bridge. It is needful to the spot, and 
yet so little likely to have survived the 
great fracture the evidences of which 
are visible around, and which has made 
a fissure of about ninety feet through 
the breadth of a rock-ribbed hill, that 
we are at first disposed to reflect upon 
it as the work of man. It is only when 
we contemplate its full measure of gian- 
deur that we are assured it is the work 
of God. We have the pier, the arch, 
the studied angle of ascent ; and that 
nothing might be wanted in the evi- 
dences of design, the Bridge is guarded 
by a parapet of rocks, so covered with 
fine shrubs and trees that a person trav- 
eling the stage-road which runs over it 
would, if not informed of the curiosity, 
pass it unnoticed. 

But let him approach through the 
foliage to the side. More than two 
hundred feet below is the creek, appa- 
rently motionless, except where it flashes 
with light as it breaks on an obstruction 
in the channel : there are trees, attain- 
ing to grander heights as they ascend 
the face of the pier ; and far below this 
bed of verdure the majestic rock rises 
with the sharpness of a wall, and the 
spectator shrinks from contemplating 
the grand but cruel depths, and turns 
away with dizzy sensations. But the 
most effective view is from the base of 
the Bridge, whither you descend by a cir- 
cuitous and romantic path. To escape 
from the hot sun into these verdant and 
cool bottoms is of itself a luxury, and it 
prepares you for the deliberate enjoy- 
ment of the scene. Everything reposes 
in the most delightful shade, setoff by the 
streaming rays of the sun, which shoot 
across the head of the picture far above 
you, and sweeten with softer touches 
the solitude below. Standing by the 
rippling, gushing waters of the creek, 
and raising your eyes to the arch, mas- 
sive and yet light and beautiful from 
its height, its elevation apparently in- 
creased by the narrowness of its piers 
and bv its projection on the blue sky, 
you gaze on this marvel of Nature with 
increased astonishment. When you 
have sustained this view of the arch 
raised against the sky, its black patches 



THE VIRGINIA TOURIST. 



163 



here and there shaped by the imagina- 
tion into grand and weird figures — 
among them the eagle, the lion's head, 
and the heroic countenance of Wash- 
ington : when you have taken in the 
proportions and circumstances of this 
elevated and wide span of rock — so 
wide that the skies seem to slope from 
it to the horizon — you are called to in- 
vestigate other features of the scene 
which strain the mind and the eyesight 
less, and are distributed around in al- 
most endless variety. Looking through 
the arch, the eye is engaged with a va- 
rious vista. Just beyond rises the fray- 
ed, unseamed wall of rock ; the purple 
mountains stand out in the background : 
beneath them is a row of hills and mat- 
ted woods enclosing the dell below, 
while the creek coursing away from 
them appears to have been fed in their 
recesses. A few feet above the bridge 
the stream detlects, and invites to a 



point of view of the most curious eflfect. 
Taking a few steps backward, we see 
the interval of sky between the great 
abutments gradually shut out : thus ap- 
parently joined or lapped over, they 
give the effect of the face of a rock, 
with a straight seam running down it, 
and the imagination seizes the picture 
as of mighty gates closed upon us, and 
leaving no outlet from the contracted 
circle of mountains and hills. Now let 
us move across to a position fronting 
where these gates apparently close. 
Slowly they seem to swing open on un- 
seen and noiseless hinges ; wider and 
wider grows the happy interval of sky, 
until at last wide open stands the gate- 
way raised above the forest, resting as 
it were on the brow of heaven — a world 
lying beyond it, its rivers and its hills 
expanding themselves to the light and 
splendor of the unshadowed day. 




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